Streaming: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence and the best haunted house films

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The director’s witty supernatural thriller joins Psycho, Hereditary, The Brutalist and more – films in which buildings are characters in their own right The first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh , Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location,...
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Camouflage review – the dark past of Argentina’s dirty war detention centres

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Author Félix Bruzzone fronts this haunting film about Campo de Mayo, where his mother was among tens of thousands of people who ‘disappeared’ under the dictatorship

The dark past of Campo de Mayo, a military camp that once served as a vast detention centre during Argentina’s so-called dirty war, is excavated in Jonathan Perel’s haunting documentary. Following noted author Félix Bruzzone as he jogs alongside the infamous site, the film is structured around the writer’s run in which the past and the present entwine. His encounters with witnesses of the dictatorship’s atrocities show that history is far from dormant, but a living, breathing thing.

Having lived in the area, Bruzzone was only recently made aware of his family ties to the site. Abducted by the secret police and taken to Campo de Mayo, his mother was among the tens of thousands who “disappeared” under the military regime. This painful memory is mirrored by Bruzzone’s conversation with an archaeologist, who talks about the human bones buried under the base, as well as the lush vegetation that flourishes above ground. The juxtaposition is startling if morbid. Indeed, as an estate agent tells Bruzzone: in spite of the camp’s horrific legacy, the prices of nearby properties have steadily risen over the years.

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