A farm house lies amid a huge Spanish plain that has had its crops harvested. A barn-like structure that is dilapidated and appears to be unoccupied is nearby. Its doors and windows are missing. Two little daughters named Ana and Isabel, together with their parents, Fernando and Teresa, reside in the house as a family of four. He is a poet, scholar, and beekeeper who spends a lot of time in his book-lined office. She is a loner who writes unidentified guys letters of longing and grief. There are no significant conversations between the parents.

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The village is having a thrilling day. Scurrying kids yell "The movies!" as a dilapidated truck rattles into town. The cinemas!" Children and elderly women assemble in the public hall to watch "Frankenstein" on a screen that has been set up with a projector (1931).

The monster, played by Boris Karloff so memorably, might as well have been the only subject of the film for the kids. The creature finds a small daughter of a farmer throwing flowers into a pond so she can watch them float. The movie jumps right from this—possibly due to censorship—to the monster empathetically carrying the child's drowned body through the community. Perhaps due to censoring, we are unable to see that he threw her in with joy, believing she would float as well, rather than drowning her. This has a dramatic effect on the two females, notably Ana (Ana Torrent).

Her misinterpretation of the sequence in "The Spirit of the Beehive" (1973), often regarded as the best Spanish film ever made, will influence what happens next. Despite the lack of a time frame, it would have been obvious to Spanish viewers that the film takes place soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War, which marked the beginning of Franco's long dictatorship. In fact, it takes place the same day that a wounded opponent of the regime seeks refuge in the outbuilding that resembles a barn.

Despite the fact that Ana and Isabel (Isabel Telleria) are only a few years apart, they create the crucial gap where Ana relies on her older sister to provide light on riddles. The young girl carelessly roams the farmlands and finds the injured soldier in the barn. She asks Isabel to explain why the creature drowned the young child that night, her eyes wide open in the pitch-black. She is informed that "everything in the movies is phoney." "Everything is a ruse. And I've actually seen him alive. He is an angel. Naturally, Ana uses that as a rationale for the wounded guy, and the following day she slips him some food, water, and her father's coat.

It's not for me to make the connections, but what comes next is said to be a coded message regarding Franco's fascist government. I identify more with it as a literary piece about children's imagination and how it may sometimes get them into trouble and sometimes save them from it.

Erice has only directed three films and a short film, "The Spirit of the Beehive" (born 1940). It is a masterwork, similar to Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), which makes us question what we lost because he didn't put in more effort. It is straightforward and serious, and by using young Ana Torrent, it makes the most of those open, innocent traits. We can well believe her when she accepts her sister’s explanation, which goes far to account for her behavior later in the film.

 

One of the most gorgeous movies I've ever watched is this one. In the interiors of the family house, the film's cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, conjures panoramas of vacant rooms where footsteps reverberate. The family doesn't appear to be living there very often. The girls frequently live alone. The parents, in their own rooms. The house's yellow-tinted honeycomb windows provide an unmistakable reference to beehives, which are frequently mentioned in the father's lyrics about the mindless churning activity of his beehives. This probably reflects on the Franco regime, but when detractors get more explicit about the similarities they detect, it makes me feel like I'm reading term papers.

Reading the film's surface is more satisfying. The misinterpretation of Ana's good intentions toward the "ghost" plus the fact that she is connected to the injured man via her father's pocket watch create a potentially hazardous situation for both father and daughter. We see how children's behaviour may get them into problems when they run away and spark a search with the help of volunteers' lanterns bobbing through the night. The older child learns how Ana's creation of myths has consequences in a later moment when she tricks Isabel.

"Cria Cuervos," a well-known Spanish film directed by Carlos Saura, had Ana Torrent as the lead (1976). Saura's "Elisa, My Life," his first movie following Franco's downfall, was one of her 45 hit films and TV shows. However, young actors frequently radiate a magic that no other role will be able to match.