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Phil (Michael Joseph Thomas Ward) is a beekeeper who has had an affair with Robin (Michelle Mueller), his son’s girlfriend. She’s recently become pregnant from the affair and Phil has tried to pressure her to “take care of it.” Rather than having an abortion, Robin, who already has a little girl named Martha (Sophie Joseph), decides to keep the baby and, instead, buys a house. She decides to spring this news on Phil as her strangely distant boyfriend, William (Joseph Bicicchi), is heading off to college. As Phil’s wife, Stella (Oksana Fedunyszn), is at the house, Phil is very nervous when Robin shows up. Even more so when she asks him to come help her unload boxes while his wife watches suspiciously from the porch.
Through hushed conversation amidst moving, Phil shows that Robin that he won’t leave his wife to join Robin in her new home and he won’t support her child if she won’t have an abortion. Spurned by the father, she goes up to chat with William.
Deciding that the son is as good as the father for her needs in a provider, she decides to get sexual with her boyfriend one last time before he leaves. However, for some reason, he abruptly stops the act about half way through, perhaps deciding that this will make it harder for him to leave her. At this point, she explains that it doesn’t matter, since she’s pregnant anyway.
This leaves William with a choice: stay with his girlfriend and help her raise child he believes is his own or follow his father’s advice and leave her and the baby to go to college?
The content is one of the most puzzling parts of The Beekeeper. Shot as his MFA Thesis Film from Columbia College Chicago, The Beekeeper is designed to be the first installment of a larger feature film. Unfortunately, unlike the short Oculus (which is also designed to be parts of a longer narrative), The Beekeeper doesn’t really make sense by itself. It feels very much like the first chapter of a longer narrative. Unfortunately, that’s a problem, because it must be successful as a short to likely encourage people to invest. As it is right now, it doesn’t seem to really have an ending, but kind of trails off after a certain number of decisions have been made, but nearly everything is up in the air. While that sort of open-endedness allowed the Coen brothers to triple their money with No Country for Old Men, I don’t think it works very well here.
(Now, there is a possibility that the director tried to provide a bit of an ending to this piece. Toward the end of the film, Stella is mending her husband’s beekeeper mask with scarlet thread. Perhaps this was designed to show that the wife knows that her husband has been unfaithful, ala The Scarlet Letter, but, if so, this detail isn’t focused on enough to contribute a strong enough ending. Now, if it had been shown in the film that, for some scientific reason, scarlet thread angers bees and makes them sting beekeepers, then Stella could actually be trying to kill Phil by mending his netting. This would be clever, but like the other possibility, would take a lot more explanation, as well.)
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