Watch The Spirit of the Beehive For Free

Wonderfully offbeat film!

One of my all time favorites.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This movie was incredibly slow and drawn out. The director would shoot one scene for 20 straight seconds and nothing would happen. The people in this movie don't like to say much either. Calling it as it is here. Immensely over rated. Why does IMDb want me to stretch this out to make my review longer? I have said all that needs to be said.

"Once upon a time, somewhere on the Castilian plateau, around 1940," a war-weary farming community is excited when the US film "Frankenstein" (1931) is to be shown at their town hall. Children are especially enthralled, with director Victor Erice focusing on two pre-teen girls, impressionable Ana Torrent (as Ana) and her mischievous older sister Isabel Telleria (as Isabel). The girls live on an expensive looking estate with their parents, beekeeper father Fernando Fernan Gomez (as Fernando) and modern-looking mother Teresa Gimpera (as Teresa)...Ana is especially mesmerized when Frankenstein's monster (Boris Karloff) meets a girl like herself (Marilyn Harris as "Maria"), and befriends the dangerous creature. Ana appears to identify with the little girl in the movie. She believes the movie characters are real and asks Isabel why they had to die. Isabel tells Ana everything in the movies is fake. The "Frankenstein" monster did not die, Isabel explains; in fact, his spirit resides in an abandoned lot near the girls' home. Of course, Ana decides to investigate. What she finds should surprise you...There are more than a few extra minutes in Mr. Erice's lyrical ode to mystery, fear and imagination. The only other compliant is that several of the characters do not really look like they exist in the year given. But, for all we know, shy little girls really did wear earrings in 1940. Erice's direction, the lonely performances, honey-colored locations, haunting music and Luis Cuadrado's photography give it a magical quality. All children have this magical time when events as they occur in "The Spirit of the Beehive" are entirely possibly, then we grow up.********* The Spirit of the Beehive (10/8/73) Victor Erice ~ Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Gomez, Teresa Gimpera

The melodious flute score is an overture to this phenomenally shot film (much owes to the cinematographer Luis Cuadrado, who went blind during the shooting and would committed suicide in 1980) with profound imagery of Spain under the circumstances of Francisco Franco's ebbing ruling regime. Running against a succinct 95 minutes, the film introduces us a rural village in 1940s, after watching the horror-classic FRANKENSTEIN (1931), a seven-year-old girl Ana inexplicably gets possessed with the spirit of the monster in the film, slowly, her elder sister Isabel, and their parents, all realize their live will eternally changed by the unstoppable pace which their country is also experiencing. The diegetic curve doesn't limn an overbearing quantity of hubbub to foreground the family- related crisis, instead, it quietly and singularly takes its time to observe every tiny fluctuation of its executors' mind of state, subtle and poetic, under the background of oil-painting-alike texture and sometimes tender amber aura, the magical influence of the film's idyllic melancholia and psychological allusions can take your breath away if you can immerse yourself into the mise en scène.Ana Torrent (3 years before her another gripping child performance RAISE RAVENS 1976, 9/10) is the attention-grabber among the cast, such a consuming delivery of a girl's convoluted mind orbit around her daily encounters under the minimal and drab milieu, also emotionally tangible is the sibling relationship between her and Isabel, more obliquely but equally palpable hinted is the insular stalemate of the communication with and between their parents, the whole state of the family sets off a torpor which is both depressing and unbearable. Ana is looking for her own monster to whom she can relate her feelings, what would be more thrilling and ironical than befriending some creature with a kind heart under the protection of a spine-chilling outfit, no matter it is a ghost or a spirit, the wounded fugitive is her salvation, but is suffocated by the cruel reality, and also creates a crevice between her and her father, the delusional imagination triggered by the poisonous mushroom is the last resort and we never know if there is a cure for her. Victor Erice's own career path is quite tortuous, over 40 years or so, the fact that only 3 feature films are made is a crystal clear testimony of an auteur's abiding friction with the investors, comfortingly at least this film doesn't fail him and will always be an incentive for aficionados to be indebted for his prowess and acknowledge his uncredited endeavor.

The Spirit Of The Beehive is an excellent and realistic portrait of childhood, with less Malickian mysticism and more realism; in that the 'realism' of a child is a different mysticism than 'adult' mysticism; or perhaps enchantment is a better term. That term also explains Ana's ideals about life, and why she stares at her father's glass beehive relentlessly, for she sees an order in it that is absent in her existence. This metaphor is far more cogent and powerful than the facile political connotations impugned. In fact, one can even argue that Ana's ordered home (replete with honeycomb shaped windows) and home life are manifestations of the beehive she loves, and, just as we view her with intent, so does she view and imbue the bees' lives. The outside world- politicized or not, by comparison, is no beehive, and things need to be ordered, by force, or by suppression- the elision of the drowning scene in Frankenstein is a good illustration of this for the diegesis of the film is her perspective, and she would likely close her eyes to that scene anyway, which is why the actual film also elides the dream sequence of Ana and the monster, as its hands seem to move to grab her.Watching films from certain periods in one's life, for the first time, is an odd experience, for often it is as if one is backfilling one's own past, altering it subtly as if one had experienced the recent past as a decades' old memory, as if it had been there all along. Throughout Erice's film, I had images and emotions of what my own existence in 1973, the year of the The Spirit Of The Beehive's release, was but, alack, in real life, I am an Isabel, not an Ana, thus I can discern the real from the irreal. On the positive side, when I state that Victor Erice's debut film is a cinema masterpiece and classic, you can rest assured that it is. Really.