Frightened, walking in the dark woods, haunted by gods and monsters.

Mem­o­ries came out of hid­ing, but not emo­tions; not even the mem­o­ries of emotions.

- Julian Barnes — Flaubert’s Par­rot

Words like “haunt­ing” and “ellip­ti­cal” fail to express the beau­ty of Vic­tor Erice’s The Spir­it of the Bee­hive. Imbued with doubt, naivete and the over­ar­ch­ing para­noia of Fran­co’s Spain, Erice con­structs a nar­ra­tive of inno­cence and loss, one that spans the gulf between par­ent and child, cre­at­ing a sto­ry of tremen­dous pow­er, mut­ed by a pover­ty of expres­sion, painful remem­brances and an unwill­ing­ness to admit deep feel­ings. As Fran­co’s Spain becomes a metaphor­i­cal place­hold­er for today’s polit­i­cal tur­moil, Erice trans­ports us to that time and place: one frozen by an anony­mous, banal, and bureau­crat­ic evil that reduces us to zom­bies par­a­lyzed by fear, the fear that those feel­ings and mem­o­ries we’ve for­got­ten may some­day come flood­ing back to drown us with regret, a fear that strips us of human­i­ty alto­geth­er, leav­ing us naked before its unname­able dread.