The Spirit of the Beehive

Saw The Spirit of the Beehive. It was one of those films where I can tell something's going on but it's too austere and oblique for me to figure out. The plot follows two sisters who are shaken by the scene in Jimmy Whales' version of Frankenstein when the monster throws the little girl into the water, killing her. One girl whispers to the other "why did he kill her?" She is really asking the larger question of "why did she have to die?" In a childish attempt at a power-grab, the other sister replies that she knows but won't tell. This sends both girls on a morbid journey of coming to terms with death. They do this in a childish way, frustrated and bored, via games and make-believe.

The film is told in a non-sensational, oblique way. For example, we see the girls' mother mail a letter and, based only on her furtiveness and the leering looks of men on a train, we suspect that she is writing to a lover. But there's nothing concrete, only this suspicion that's built up. Their father is much more accessible. He is a gentleman of some kind who teaches the girls about thematically poisonous mushrooms and keeps the titular beehive. To him, the busy activity of the hive is a mocking mirror for human affairs. As the bees' actions are of no consequence, so too, he concludes, is that of humans.

The film is excellent at being evocative. There's a scene at school when one of the girls puts in the eyes of an anatomical doll and is kind of freaked out. I don't know why, but somehow in that moment the doll is indeed freaky. You are thrust back into the madness of childhood when fantasy was so much stronger. There's a brilliant sequence where one of the girls is walking by a black steam. Is it the styx or is it the river that the monster threw the little girl into?

The subtler points of the film's plot are kind of lost on me (I don't know, for example, who their mother was writing to although I think it was explained) and a lot of action I had to just accept more than understand. That said, it is quite evocative and deliberate. I was sort of falling asleep through the first half (I use the word "deliberate" as a flattering was of saying "slow") but then the following occurred to me, which kept me alert through the rest of the film: if the film is about death, then surely one of the girls has to die. I won't tell if I guessed right or wrong.