The Spirit of the Beehive

(Note: This essay is a newly edited and expanded take on a review, originally published on March 7, 2022, to celebrate the release of Víctor Erice’s new film, Close Your Eyes.)

In The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), the innocence of a single child becomes an allegory for all of Spain. The story follows six-year-old Ana, whose wide-eyed curiosity and tragic resilience in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War are conveyed through her vivid imagination, fueled by the power of cinema. Filmmakers have often relied on children to access the purest form of emotions or the truest sense of humanity. However, when juxtaposed against a backdrop of trauma, violence, death, and corruption—and the monsters who create them—a child’s perspective will return the viewer to a time before we learned the many harsh lessons the world teaches, before we made endless moral compromises, and before we accepted or learned to compartmentalize so many awful truths. Writer-director Víctor Erice positions Ana—played by Ana Torrent, who would once again work with Erice in his 2024 return with Close Your Eyes—as a reminder of what people lost during the conflict. He frames the violence and horror through the eyes of a child, which reminds us how to see these truths for what they are. It’s no coincidence when, in a scene in her village’s classroom during an anatomy lesson in which students place organs onto a cutout of a man, a teacher calls on Ana to locate the figure’s eyes. Ana puts the eyes in their spot, allowing the man to see, just as she does for the audience. 

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