The Spirit in the Beehive

The Spirit in the Beehive (1973)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070040/]

The Gist:
This is one of those films that I came upon by accident, where I had no initial knowledge of it but the premise sounded so intriguing that I had to sit down and watch it. I was scanning Netflix Watch Instantly and I read a synopsis about a young girl who watches Frankenstein and then goes searching for the real monster's spirit, eventually believing she's found it in a deserter from the Spanish Civil War. The synopsis was a bit disingenuous, which can happen with Netflix, mainly because the film is such a weird existential minimalist allegory that it becomes somewhat difficult to define it. Essentially though, the story has to do with effects of the disintegration of a family, particularly the structure of the married parents, and how the children are subtly influenced. One child becomes rather morbid, nearly strangling a cat out of whim, painting her lips with blood, pretending she's dead to frighten her younger sister. The other, of course, retreats into this fantasy of Frankenstein's monster. The whole film evokes a cryptic beauty, each scene drenched in silence and brooding nostalgia.