Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Dr. Jean Markham returns to the town she left as a teenager to take over her late father's medical practice. When a school-yard scuffle lands Charlie in her surgery, she invites him to visit the hives in her garden and tell his secrets to the bees, as she once did. The new friendship between the boy and the bee keeper brings his mother Lydia into Jean's world.
Tell It to the Bees is a quiet, atmospheric period romance set in 1950s Scotland with a tender lesbian love story at its center. The plot is earnest but somewhat predictable in its arc of forbidden love, social pressure, and tragedy, following familiar beats of mid-century repression narratives. The acting from Anna Paquin and Holliday Grainger is committed and warm, though the supporting cast is uneven. Cinematography captures the Scottish countryside with modest beauty but rarely transcends competent period staging. The film's novelty lies in its gentle, unhurried tone and the charming bee-whispering motif, which gives it a distinctive fairy-tale texture, though the overall conception doesn't feel singular enough to stand out strongly in the LGBT period drama landscape. The ending leans heavily on melodrama and feels rushed and somewhat unsatisfying given the careful emotional build-up, undercutting the film's more thoughtful earlier passages.