A haunting atmospheric film that focuses on a young girl's obsession with the Frankenstein monster. Ana, a charming eight years old, lives in a Castillian village in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War. Although the village has been spared from the destruction of battle, the effects of war are still felt, and the villagers buckle under Francoist repression. Ana's mother shares a dream tends a beehive and ponders existence in an ongoing work he calls "The Spirit of Beehive". After watching the 1931 version of Frankenstein, Ana begins to worry about the monster and returns daily to the old house where her ten years old sister Isabel says he can be found. Eventually an escaped convict becomes a surrogate for the monster, but though he is killed, Ana continues to cling to the idea that the monster's spirit exists, holding on to the power of imagination. A thought provoking, highly symbolic work about the isolation engendered by Franco's stultifying reign, made by a member of a generation of Spanish filmmakers forced to cloak their political messages in allegory.
