Watched: "Spirit of the Beehive"

I'm a sucker for a good film about little kids trying to understand the world around them, especially when faced with conflicting information.

Be it Ponette where a small French girl tries to figure out what happened to her mother after she died or Pan's Labyrinth where a Spanish girl loses herself in an imaginative fantasy world as a way of dealing with the violence surrounding her during the Spanish Civil War.

I decided to watch Spirit of the Beehive because of Pan's Labyrinth, and really, to call it an influence is understating the connection. It's clear to me after watching it how important this film is to Pan director Guillermo del Toro and his compatriot Alfonso Caurón.

Clearly this film resonated with both directors strongly, and one theme has continued through all of their films that has its roots here — telling a story that is directly influenced by, but not directly about surrounding war-time violence or political distress.

Caurón has mastered this with films like Y Tu Mamá También which takes the characters on a road trip past the economic and political discorse in Mexico, and in Children of Men a pregnant woman and the protagonist find themselves passing through a war in the future spurred by the infertility of humanity.

This film is more significant to Del Toro however, who has placed two films against the same political backdrop as Spirit of the Beehive. On top of Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone tells a ghost story at an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, which Guillermo has called a "spiritual prequel" to the former.

In Beehive, Ana goes to see Frankenstein at a mobile theater. She becomes obsessed with the character and wonders why he killed the little girl and then why the people killed Frankenstein. Either to comfort her (unlikely) or another scheme in that warped little head, her older sister, Isabel, tells her that Frankenstein never died. He's really a spirit, and lives in an abandoned farm building near by.

Ana visits the building after school, and eventually finds a fugitive soldier she believes is the spirit of Frankenstein, and befriends him.

But don't let the skeletal plot points bog down what this film really accomplishes. It takes almost the full 97 minutes of filmtime to get to this point. While Ana becomes locked in this spiritual fascination with Frankenstein, her mother obsesses over a lost lover who appears to be involved somehow in the war (perhaps as a soldier?) and her father obsesses over his beehives, staying up late and writing and re-writing a poem about a glass-enclosed hive he keeps in his office.

It's a visually stunning movie, and for those who have watched a lot of movies with me, they know that's all it takes really. And without spoiling the ending much, the whole thing left on an ambiguous note for me, even moreso than Pan's Labyrinth which (some would argue) begs the question of whether the fantasy elements were truly real or a way of the girl trying to cope with a violent reality. I think examining Pan's against the Beehive, it seems to me that both became obsessed with these spirits and fantasies almost as a way of grappling with what surrounded them.

If all these elements aren't enough to outline just how much Beehive influences Pan, just take a look at these two images from each film. In the top, Ana is going out to her balcony in yet another attempt to call out to the spirit of Frankenstein, and on the bottom, Ofelia is heading into the tunnels under a tree as yet another task ordered by a really scary looking faun.


With this film out of the way, it's on to the next on my queue. You'd think with 200 films on my list, I'd be able to pick one easily. Not the case.