Alessio is a character in the movie Voice From The Stone. That alone is almost enough of a review, given what we get of him, but I shall press on.

Alessio is the groundskeeper or butler or general servant or whatever at a fancy Italian manor, and among the duties we see him perform is some keeping of bees. We get one scene in which he does that and no more. He never talks about beekeeping, nobody else talks about his beekeeping, just that one scene. Otherwise, he’s just kind of rude to he main character (either because he feels bad about what will happen to her, or because he’s just rude) and loyally serves the estate owner.

In a way, it’s a shame. There are threads I could follow to make him sound more impressive if I wanted to. First of all, he is a jack of all trades. Often when a beekeeper is good at beekeeping and other things, I note that the other skills are one of the things that make a good beekeeper. But in this case, we don’t even know that he’s good at beekeeping. Another plus is that his family has lived there for about 1200 years, which could indicate a long lineage of beekeepers, always something I like, or that he would have an intimate knowledge of the land. But without the actual focus on beekeeping, those become potential distractions instead of pluses.

There’s a bunch of potentially supernatural stuff going on that he seems to be in on, if any of it is true. He tells the main woman “the more you talk, the less you hear” to help direct her toward noticing the spiritual side of things, and he has his little rituals that pay respect to the dead. Again, if his beekeeping was just a little more prominent I could use these as proof he’s more than just some guy who occasionally keeps bees. But as it is, he’s just some guy who occasionally keeps bees.

Two Honeycomb out of Five. I am aware that this movie was based on a novel that I haven’t read. Maybe it goes deeper into the beekeeping or into the spiritualism and I could bump him up a grade, but until I read that, this is what he gets.