A mesmerising film which conflates the drive to wish-fulfilment - a young girl, after watching the death of her father, comes to believe she holds the key to life and death - with a partial account of the last days of Fascism in Spain. At the root of both strands of Saura's elliptical script lies the idea of repression as the motor force behind the strange goings-on in the isolated (yet in the middle of Madrid) house of the Anselmo family. Intriguingly, the film suggests that the spirit of the dusty surrealism of Buñuel lives on in his native Spain.[Phil Hardy, Time out]