Beehives
Ironically for a movie with such a title, there is exactly one scene and one passage of dialogue explicitly related to the titular subject. Of course, it should be noted (and will be below) that bee imagery is persistent throughout the film. The one passage of dialogue (technically a monologue by the husband/father of the family) is pure metaphorical imagery:
“Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main cogwheel of a clock, someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious, frantic commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the bustling bridges and stairways of wax, by the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet futile effort, the feverish comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day's work, the final rest of death far from a place that tolerates neither the sick nor tombs, someone who observed these things after the initial surprise had passed, looked away quickly with an expression of sad, inexplicable fright.”
Hexagons
It is important to take note that the title of the film specifically references the spirit of the hive and not the bees. This helps to explain to anyone who might be confused by there is just the one short visual image of actual bees. The bees here are metaphorical: the family unit. And the hive is their home which is represented by the often-striking visual imagery of the light hexagon-shaped panels of glass in the windows and glass doors of their home.
Frankenstein
It is a difficult proposition to decide which is the more significant imagery of the film: the recurring motif of the beehive hexagon or the less omnipresent but thematically pervasive imagery of Frankenstein’s Creature from the 1931 Universal Studios film. It is the image of the Creature—specifically the scene in which the Creature accidentally kills a young girl picking flowers by a lake and the subsequent reaction by the villagers to seek vengeance—which is the controlling dynamic imagery of the film. While the figure of the Creature appears only one more time after the sequence where it is screened for the town, his presence is a specter over the rest of the narrative. Ana is spiritually haunted by Creature to the point of hallucinating his actual physical manifestation and the scene in the film which touches her so deeply is replicated in her relationship with the fugitive rebel soldier.
Isabel’s Resurrection
The most disturbing imagery in the film for most people—by far—is the sequence in which older sister Isabel pranks Ana by setting things up so that she will be discovered by impressionable younger sister in a state of death. Several elements contribute to make this scene so unnerving. For one thing, it seems to last forever. The film is marked by long shots little or no dialogue but this sequence seems to be twice as long as any other. Then there are the performances, especially by that of the young actress playing Isabel. The horror that we feel for Ana is only possible because Isabel is selling the prank with everything she’s got. She doesn’t give away for a moment that it is a prank and since it comes after the scene in which their father explains that eating the wrong mushroom can kill, viewers are encouraged to make that connection even if not consciously.
The temptation must have been great to relieve the punishing tension of this scene by telegraphing to the audience that Ana need not really be so distressed, but the temptation is rejected. Since the scene does go on so long, at a certain point almost any viewer will conclude that things have turned tragic. And then the tension is relieved when Isabel reveals she is still very much alive by grabbing Ana from behind and it is only at this point that the purpose of the scene becomes clear as it connects back to Frankenstein bringing the dead back to life with his Creature, and Isabel’s insistence that “everything in the movies is fake.”
