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Luis Buñuel observed that one “can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects" and so it is here: the struggles and internal politics over the life cycle of a bee hive provide plenty of gripping material. But I cribbed that quote from the opening of Jim Trainor's brilliant 2016 experimental feature The Pink Egg, and ultimately I prefer the extreme otherness of his avant-garde theater melodrama to Paull's translation of apine life into a kind of high fantasy complete with an elaborate hero's journey. As someone who adored Watership Down as a child, I can appreciate her myth-making, and even more so her willingness to portray animal perspectives so directly without overly anthropomorphizing, but there's something a little reductive in the breathless thrill-ride by which this unfolds that loses the alienness of insect awareness. That said, the aspects of insect awareness that she does attempt to portray here are fascinating, even as I'm quite unable to comment on their accuracy. I honestly suspect that her research was quite diligent and the specifics here, however outlandish-seeming, are drawn from a faithful attempt to render comprehensible aspects of bee interaction and communication very far from our access (okay, I'm glossing the interspecies interactions, which, predation aside, can't have come from anything much). But still, it's mostly just the format she chooses that muddles the impact (by attempting to overheighten it).