Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
In 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl living on the Castilian plain is haunted after attending a screening of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein and hearing from her sister that the monster is not dead, instead existing as a spirit inhabiting a nearby barn.
Víctor Erice's debut is a hauntingly elliptical masterwork of Spanish cinema. Ana Torrent's wordless, wide-eyed performance is genuinely exceptional — one of cinema's great child performances — and Luís Cuadrado's cinematography bathes the Castilian landscape in golden, melancholic light that is visually singular. Its allegorical layering of childhood imagination, Francoist repression, and the weight of history gives it a distinctiveness that makes it unmistakably one-of-a-kind. The plot, however, is deliberately minimal and dreamlike to a degree that can feel elusive rather than resonant, and the ending, while atmospherically powerful, resolves more poetically than satisfyingly for some viewers.