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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Conclave review – Ralph Fiennes shines as papal election results in high-camp gripper

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Fiennes is broodingly compelling as a potential English pope caught up in murky Vatican intrigue around choosing the next pontiff

Who knew that the laborious process of democracy, of simply voting over and over again, could be so exciting and so amusing? Edward Berger’s drama is adapted with masterly flair by screenwriter Peter Straughan from the Robert Harris pageturner; Ralph Fiennes is on sumptuous form as the deeply troubled Cardinal Lawrence at the centre of a murky Vatican plot. The result is a high-camp gripper, like the world’s most serious Carry On film.

Fiennes’ character is Italian in Harris’s book, but Straughan makes him an Englishman: an unquiet soul who is theoretically on the verge of becoming the first English pope since Adrian IV, although no one is so vulgar or nationalistic as to point that out. With the ailing pope in extremis, Cardinal Lawrence arrives at His Holiness’s death bed to find other ambitious cardinals, who have all cultivated an opaque, unreadable manner of cordially respectful friendship with each other, now manoeuvring to be considered the successor in the imminent conclave, or election. In this blue chip supporting cast Stanley Tucci plays Bellini, the liberal; Sergio Castellitto is pugnacious, reactionary Tedesco, a racist bigot; John Lithgow is Tremblay, whose blandly emollient manner is misleading; Lucian Msamati is the bullish Adeyemi; and Carlos Diehz is Benitez, an unknown figure who to everyone’s polite consternation had been created Cardinal Archbishop of Kabul without anyone realising. Yet all of these men are upstaged by the late pontiff’s confidante Sister Agnes, shrewdly played by Isabella Rossellini.

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