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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In Short, Europe: Best of Best review – heady celebration of European short film-making

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This year’s edition of the festival, Best of Best, will show a collection of 28 award-winning short films across five strands offering dystopian visions and ideological bite

With the EU recently passing the world’s first artificial intelligence law, this year’s trawl of European shorts from cultural organisation Eunic London doesn’t miss a trick by dwelling on matters algorithmic in much of its first section, Smile You’re on Camera – most prominently the ongoing wrangle between tech and labour in the workplace. It’s the one overtly topical strand alongside four others (Hard Decisions; People on the Precipice; Psychodrama; and the kids’ animation section Why’s the Sky Blue?) that stick to the more abstract themes into which Eunic typically packages up Europe’s film-making grassroots.

The longest work here, the 23-minute I’m Not a Robot, by the Netherlands’ Victoria Warmerdam, doesn’t quite live up to a canny premise: the music-company worker whose inability to pass a Captcha test means that she is, in fact, a robot. Ellen Parren, in a sharp performance, twitches with affront at the suggestion in this sitcom-y spin on Blade Runner’s existential riddle. But, as her boyfriend weighs in and mansplains her newfound dronedom, it devolves into a talky slog that adds little beyond MeToo frills to the black box of the sentience question. And – through no fault of the film-makers – it’s also the one most tenuously related to the theme of being watched.

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