Director Victor Erice

A very slow, painterly film that grew on me. I kept having the feeling that I had seen certain scenes before – perhaps I watched it decades ago on BBC2? – but, if so, it was in the days when such films left me baffled rather than intrigued.

The title was a bit of a stumbling block. I am accultured to think of the beehive as something positive: co-operation and industry for the common good, just like the stone beehive carved above the old Co-op store front that I passed on my way home. It’s an image reinforced by modern use of the bee – the symbol of the regeneration of Manchester, or pollinators essential for life. And yet in the film the beehive seems to have a more malign connotation. The unthinking, unreflecting hive-mind that keeps on doing the same thing endlessly, ruled over by a queen and her army. Or a dictator and his army; thus I realised I had to rethink my interpretation of what a beehive may represent. An interview with the director was enlightening.

It’s set in 1940 in an isolated village on the central plain. A family: large house, parents who barely communicate, two little girls whom we first see watching “Frankenstein” in the village hall. Ana is enthralled by it, and, in a world between reality and imagination fuelled by her sister’s ideas, she seeks out her own spirit friend.

There’s little dialogue, and, as far as I recall, the camerawork is static and lingering. Scenes are more like tableaux vivants. There’s a sense of oppression and menace – the little girls lingering by the train tracks for example – which is only lightened by Ana’s imagination and the occasional kindness of adults. But Ana’s imagination – growing out of the heavy silences and fuelled by a celluloid monster – is somewhat macabre.

Perhaps the scene where the father lifts bee frames out of the hive to examine them has its parallel in the negatives that a film maker holds up to the light. It’s the kind of film that has an afterlife in your own imagination.