Ana Torrent makes a child’s watchfulness absorbing without making her thoughts easy to read. In The Spirit of the Beehive, she gives Víctor Erice’s patient film its emotional force, and that remains where we would begin.
Fi1m perspective
In The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Ana Torrent watches with the concentration of a child who has not learnt what adults consider worth noticing. Her Ana’s fascination with Frankenstein’s monster is serious, and Torrent never invites us to find it merely sweet. We were unsettled by her stillness, because she seemed to be taking in more than she could make sense of. The performance keeps us looking for an explanation in her face without promising that every thought can be read there. That is a considerable part of why Víctor Erice’s film holds our attention.
That does not make The Spirit of the Beehive an effortless watch. Its images occasionally keep us at a distance, and the pace asks for patience; Torrent gives us a reason to stay with it. We want to understand Ana, rather than congratulate the film on having found such an expressive child. Erice gets something valuable from her here: a performance that moves us while leaving the character’s thoughts partly beyond our reach.
Her early films made that watchfulness central: Erice gave her the lead, and Carlos Saura followed with another major child role in Cría cuervos (1976). Those performances still dominate her reputation, which can make the adult work seem like an afterthought before it has been considered. Thesis (1996), directed by Alejandro Amenábar, marks the important change, with Torrent taking her first major adult lead as Ángela. The determined, investigative women of her later thrillers and dramas offer another use for that concentrated presence.
Her adult career also includes Katherine of Aragon in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) and a return to Erice as Ana Arenas in Close Your Eyes (2023). The reunion came fifty years after their first film, but it need not turn every discussion of Torrent into a return to childhood. We would still begin with The Spirit of the Beehive, allowing for its deliberate pace. Follow it with Thesis before deciding that her childhood is all there is to see.
Biography
Ana Torrent Bertrán de Lis is a Spanish actress. She was born on 12 July 1966 in Madrid.
She made her screen debut at the age of seven in the starring role of Ana in Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). She followed this with the lead child's role in Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos (1976).
As an adult she has appeared in films including Alejandro Amenábar's Thesis (1996), for which she received a Goya Award nomination for Best Actress, and as Katherine of Aragon in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008). She trained in acting with Cristina Rota in Madrid and Uta Hagen in New York.
