A great Spanish film about childhood, death and painful memories, featuring an exceptional performance by the bright-eyed if soulful Ana Torrent, with director Saura deftly navigating different planes of temporal and psychological realities.

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The young, bright-eyed if soulful Ana Torrent (of 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive fame) gives an exceptional performance as Ana, who must adapt to a new reality after her mother (played by Geraldine Chaplin) dies of illness. 

Together with her siblings, they move into the house of their aunt.  Ana, however, is almost always in a world of her own. 

Her active mind allows her to ‘visualise’ memories of cherished moments with her ailing mother and this is where Cria cuervos… truly works as an enigmatic piece about death and mortality, as seen through the eyes of a child. 

Director Carlos Saura, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year, gives us a great Spanish film about childhood, so artfully made that he manages to deftly navigate different planes of temporal and psychological realities. 

“Some lies can do a lot of harm.”

With deceptively simple acts of framing and blocking, Saura could turn a single shot from present to past, from reality to memory, maybe even imagination.  Yet the entire film feels so naturalistic that any hint of surrealism is suppressed. 

Guilt is a key theme, of not doing enough to protect loved ones.  Ana feels responsible for her mother’s death and her father’s infidelity.  Someone’s always culpable, even the state. 

Saura’s film was released a year after Franco’s death, even as its narrative is set in the last years of the dictator’s rule.  While not an overtly political film, one can’t help but read Cria cuervos… as a new beginning for Spain, represented by Ana. 

Haunted by spectres of the past (sometimes literally), she must navigate her hallucinations and what’s left of her torrid childhood as the adults around her cease to exist as disciplinary role models.

Grade: A-

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