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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Blink review – family’s poignant bucket list trip turns into glossy travelogue

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A couple who discover that three of their four children have a degenerative eye disease go on a round-the-world family holiday in this beautifully shot but saccharine documentary

An active, boisterous French-Canadian family of six, led by mum Edith Lemay and dad Sébastien Pelletier, discover that three out of their four kids have the gene for the disease retinitis pigmentosa. That means eldest sister Mia, and younger boys Colin and Laurent will gradually go blind, first by losing their ability to see in the dark. Only middle child Léo got lucky and didn’t inherit it. When the parents asked a doctor what they would do if their child got such a diagnosis, the doctor said they would help their children make as many visual memories as they could while they still had time, so the Lemay-Pelletiers decided to take a year out and go travelling around the world, funded by shares Sébastian had just recently gained. As well as presumably some kind of financial or at least logistical support from the film-makers who are quietly documenting all this from the start, backed by the National Geographic channel.

That station’s involvement partly explains the wholesome, squarely sentimental tone of the film, which constantly emphasises what a lovely nice family these people are even as they face a literal dark future together. Even the font used for onscreen graphics, mimicking a clumsy handheld script, is aggressively corny-cutesy. The slow drip of sanctification, forced down with an especially saccharine score, may be enough to make some viewers go off the film and even the subjects themselves as they enjoy the dream holiday of a lifetime, flying from country to country, and ticking items off their bucket list like “see a sunset in the desert” and “drink juice while riding a camel”.

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