Our Fault review – ultra-glossy Spanish step-sibling melodrama is too bland to be annoying

Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024 , that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched. Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their ...

Presence review – Steven Soderbergh’s intriguing ghost story experiment

Sundance film festival: The director tells a haunted house tale from the perspective of the spirit in a visually interesting yet dramatically underwhelming gambit

For the majority of film-makers, the restrictions insisted by Covid became a stifling force and created a clear dividing line between those who could flourish in extremely prohibitive circumstances and those who could not. Steven Soderbergh, a director who has never allowed anything – from Oscar glory to blockbuster success – to kill his plucky spirit of invention, made one of the only essential pandemic movies with the maddeningly underseen thriller Kimi, a sleek and canny new-tech upgrade of a paranoid 70s thriller. He found a way, along with the screenwriter David Koepp, to maximise limitations and the two have smartly reunited for a project that carries on-paper similarities.

Presence, a project shrouded in trademark mystery, shot over last summer with a waiver and now unveiling at Sundance, is another one-location genre exercise, playfully riffing on age-old tropes and allowing Soderbergh, as both director and cinematographer, the opportunity to experiment. This time he’s playing with the conventions of haunted house horror, his film told from the perspective of the ghost situated in a recently renovated house, new inhabitants moving in – a family, led by Lucy Liu and the This is Us actor Chris Sullivan with the newcomers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as their teenage children. Like families often do in this genre, they’re arriving with excess baggage, tensions they hope will dissipate in a new home, a fresh start after a period of unease.

Presence is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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