Film · 1973 · Drama
The Spirit of the Beehive
Directed by Victor Erice
1973
★ 7.0 editorial score
A small girl in Franco's Spain sees Frankenstein at a traveling cinema and decides the monster is real: almost nothing is said, and the silence is the point.
“Long before Guillermo del Toro made Pan's Labyrinth, Víctor Erice was exploring the emotional consequences of Spain's plummet to dictatorship, the power of childhood imagination and the allure of the fantastic in his cinema...when Erice made this his first film, Franco was still in power and so his depiction of eight-year-old Ana's psychologically damaged parents in the immediate aftermath of Franco's victory in 1940 was dangerous material.”
Where to watch
