a film by Víctor Erice
Hailed as an audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, the film is set in a rural 1940s Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret.
Ana, a sensitive seven-year-old girl and her sister Isabel, go to watch a travelling cinema's screening of James Whale's Frankenstein. Ana becomes fascinated by Boris Karloff's monster, an experience that forever alters her perception of the world around her, and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Profoundly disturbed by the scenes in which the monster murders the little girl and is later killed himself by the villagers, Ana questions Isabel about the profundities of life and death. She believes her older sibling when Isabel tells her that the monster is not dead, but exists as a spirit inhabiting a nearby abandoned barn, adding that the spirit can be contacted at any time by closing her eyes and calling "I'm Ana". Isabel takes Ana to the barn after school, making her wait outside while she explores inside the building. Amused and intrigued by Ana's naivety, Isabel then teases her sister by feigning death, suggesting a likeness to the fate of the little girl in the film, but Ana feeling betrayed, retreats into herself.
While her emotionally exhausted parents go about their mundane daily affairs, having little impact on Ana's internal world, she becomes obsessed with meeting the initially gentle monster and visits the barn alone several times after school to seek him. One night she finds the courage to summon the monster, and going out into the moonlight, she closes her eyes and calls to him. As she does so, a fugitive republican soldier leaps from a passing train and limps across the fields to hide in the abandoned barn. The next day Ana encounters the fugitive there. For her, he is the spirit of the monster who has answered her summons and she accepts his presence without question, returning with food and clothing for him from the house.
The fugitive is then found by the civil guard and shot dead, his body taken to the village. The clothes he was wearing and a pocket watch he carried are identified as being the property of Ana's father. When she again returns to the barn, Ana finds that her monster is no longer there, only the blood from his gunshot wounds remains. Her father, sensing Ana's involvement in the mystery of his clothes and watch, has followed her to the barn, but as he approaches she runs from him across the fields. Later that night when she has not returned, search parties begin to scour the local countryside, eventually finding her asleep beside the walls of a ruined building. Whilst she is roaming in the woods alone, we see a dream-like evocation of Ana's meeting with Frankenstein's monster in which she has become the little girl in the film, and we conclude that for her, the monster continues to exist.
During the period that follows, Ana, still traumatised and confined to bed, ignores the presence of her family and does not speak. The doctor tries to reassure her mother that she will in time forget her experiences and will recover completely. Later, in the night when alone, Ana rises from her bed and standing before the open window, facing the moonlit night outside, she closes her eyes and calls to the spirit, "I'm Ana. I'm Ana".
Made under the Franco regime, this astonishing feature debut from 1973 is one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970s. An enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. Existing in a highly evocative dream-like state, it is a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale, a timeless masterpiece that is as unique as it is beautiful.
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