[Cria Cuervos] is nothing if not fragmentary and allusive in venturing on to the fraught terrain of childhood sensibility.

The jumble of family snapshots accompanying the opening titles functions as a correlative for Saura's mosaic approach as well as introducing a key visual theme….

The linking of imagination and memory is the movie's stock-in-trade to the extent of permeating its structure. For while the action has a contemporary setting, it is in effect taking place in the past tense, since the narrative is punctuated by episodes in which a grown-up Ana comments directly to camera about her childhood (not, she says emphatically, a paradise of innocence) from a vantage point some twenty years in the future—a time which for the audience can exist only in the imagination…. [The device of using the same actress to play Ana's mother and Ana as an adult] admits alternative interpretations: on the one hand, Ana has ultimately 'become' the figure around whom her childhood fantasy of reassurance has been woven; on the other, Ana's childhood comforter is a materialisation of her own older self. But the alternatives are not mutually exclusive, and it is at their intersection that the movie can be said to be taking place.

Such a notion achieves witty expression in the sequence in which Ana and her sisters are driven by Paulina to visit the country home of Amelia … and her husband, the sequence in which Ana's mother makes her most sustained imaginary appearance. Saura precedes this with the adult Ana's recollection of the event, so that when he cuts from her to a forward travelling shot from behind the car, our impression is of a journey into the past, even though the child we see is in fact being taken forward into a novel experience. The visual resonance is amplified both by the fact that Ana is staring back the way she has come and by her being viewed from behind the glass of the rear window, as if in a time capsule.

The two-way pull exerted here rhymes with that created earlier, when Ana is seen playing in the rambling garden with her siblings, and is suddenly transported to the roof above to gaze down on the scene and to feel herself flying above it; the disequilibrium in the images offers its own comment on the impossibility of a distanced view of the self. The matter-of-fact strangeness of that episode serves to recall that, while Cria Cuervos may seem to owe a debt to Resnais, Saura is also in some measure a disciple of his compatriot Buñuel….

Ana's preoccupation with death fuses the film's personal and political levels, since it marks her as both the inheritor of an outmoded class and the potential agent of its destruction. Whether Ana's belief in the lethal properties of her tin of supposed poison is justified we never know—since Paulina emerges unharmed near the movie's end from an application of the powder, it may be that Ana's father actually died from other causes. What counts is her implicit trust in it and the communication of a perception of death which goes beyond that entailed in the burial of a pet guinea-pig….

[Humour] is by no means absent from the film—consider the nursery theatricals, with the diminutive Maite cheerfully resigned to the supernumerary role of maid while her sisters lay claim to the leads…. It is true, though, that towards the end Saura allows the grip to slacken, and Paulina's burgeoning love affair with a brother officer of Ana's father is introduced to arbitrary and confusing effect.

The ending, however, is wholly effective…. On the soundtrack a pop song blares out (possibly in homage to [Buñuel's] Viridiana, which also concluded by sending its heroine out into the world to a pop accompaniment). The effect is satisfyingly ambiguous, as the music simultaneously speaks for the anodyne of admass existence and refers us back to the images of Ana solitarily listening to her gramophone in the family home with its imprisoning memories.