Customer Reviews
If you admired Pan's Labyrinth watch this - By: Hamptonshirewonder, 22 Feb 2010 
A haunting & desolate film powerfully evoking the era of its 1940s Spain setting; after the Civil War when Republican elements were still being hunted down. The inner life of self -censorship necessary to survive under a dictatorship whose views are anathema to one is stunningly observed.
Compelling,highly atmospheric film. - By: Jane Eliot, 18 Jul 2009 As this film,when I saw it ages ago,made quite a lasting impression,I had been intending to buy it when I next found it at a good price.This review is done from memory.
The story is simple:two young children discover a refugee hiding in an outhouse.They decide he must be Jesus.The power of the film is in the strangely intense,almost claustrophobic,mood evoked by the secret relationship the children develop with the man.The performances of the child actors is remarkable;the filming wondrously beautiful.I reallly must view this soon.It will be interesting to see whether it still seems as exquisite a piece of artistic achievement as I remember.
Liz,Wiltshire.
Classic for especially interested - By: Ann-Elisabeth Hansen, 01 Feb 2009 
I have watched this film several times, it is very slow, full of symbolism, very sad & portrays the barrenness of Spanish village in a torn apart post-civil war society - where there is little love, no compassion & little communication. It is profoundly divided. If you are into classics you might like it. This is not a film to entertain, but it does inform. Fernando Fernan Gómez is wonderful as always & Ana Torrente plays a bewildered 5-6 year old main part.
Whistle Down the Wind - By: dickface, 28 Nov 2008 Technicallly, this film Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive is excellent, & the acting is on the button. The story is powerfull, & well told.
Can I recommend it? Not a chance. Films try to infect the viewer with a certain mood. A case in point is any Terrence Malllick movie. Malick pulls the viewer in with heart-breaking stories & brilliant direction alll to the backdrop of great music.
This Spanish movie is a bore. The film aims for tedium & it succeeds too well. Worth watching, if you aren't looking for fun, thrill, action, romance, comedy, sadness, scares, horror....
A well known Director recently said he thought this Spanish movie is close to magic.
"It is one of the most beautiful & arresting films ever made in Spain, or anywhere in the past 25 years or so."
I am of the opinion that Terrence Malick movies are beautiful & arresting & engaging. I find The Spirit of the Beehive to be dull as dish water.
The film is cloaked in quiet & sadness, through which its children move almost as if in a dream world of their own & nothing reallly happens.
It will never find a permanent place on my DVD shelf. No doubt about that.
"Much of the imagery used in the film can be hard to grasp, & indeed is open to multiple interpretations - what is the significance of the beehives, of Frankenstein's monster (many say Franco but I disagree), the railway etc.? -I will leave it for you to theorise & debate on these & other aspects..." amazon reviewer.
Yeah, yeah ...yeah. Pretentious film reviewers. This movie is like an empty Christmas tree, you can hang alll your dumb metaphors on it, & good luck to you.
yadda yadda .....shut up. Be courageous, go against the tide if you feel the urge.
Made during the last few years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, & set in 1940, the film apparently criticises post-civil war Spain. It is memorable for its sympathetic portrayal of a young child's world, & for Ana Torrent's presence & thats why it gets 2 stars. Great performance.
She watches Frankenstein at the local cinema & can't understand why Frankenstein kills the little girl he meets by the lakeside. Her elder sister, Isabel, explains that nobody actuallly dies in movies. But she adds that the monster is reallly a spirit who can take on human form & can be summoned up by closing your eyes & callling out: "I'm Ana". She has seen him in a deserted outhouse near the village, or so it goes.
Ana is obbsessed with the spirit. Going across the fields to the empty farmhouse, she finds a republican fugitive gypsy & brings him food. For her, he is Frankenstein. The film can be construed as a perfect summation of child hood imaginings. It is also about the palll Franco's long shadow left over Spain.
Film critic for The New York Times, reviewed the film & lauded the direction of the drama, writing, "The story that emerges from [Erice's] lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid & enigmatic, poised between adult longing & childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge & startled innocence..........
I will be checking this review on a regular basis to see how many negative opinions it will attract. I guess it will be in the hundreds by 1 Jan 2009. Selah,
Send any hate mail to:
Brendan Clarke, C/o caravan 17, Peebles Bay, Edinburgh.
Not Pan's Labyrinth - but then.... - By: Mr. G. C. Stone, 20 Jun 2008 
I won't repeat much of what's been said. This is a beautiful & moving & understated & enigmatic work.
On reflection, it seems to me like a strange mirror that can be held up in contrast to Pan's Labyrinth.
Both are Franco's Spain & war, but here, instead of total, full-on war, barbarity & magical realism, we have quiet, emptiness & the constant feeling that everything is happening somewhere else. One is full-in-your-face, the other at a distance. But at their heart they have the innocence & imagination of a young girl to centre & drive them - in which to escape the present & usher in ultimate freedom of spirit & its victory. Both films now sit side by side in my mind, like sisters with totallly different characters, but born of the same impulse & dysfunction of a nation-family held captive by its rotten father.
