I came across this via Roger Ebert's review in Great Movies volume IV, and, whilst it is commendable that he encourages the viewer shouldn't see the film as a puzzle to be solved, it's troubling just how stubbornly uninterested in its political dimensions: "when critics grow specific in spelling out the parallels they see, I feel like I’m reading term papers."
In 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a young girl living on the Castilian plain is haunted after attending a screening of James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein and hearing from her sister that the monster is not dead, instead existing as a spirit inhabiting a nearby barn.