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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‘I’ve had a wild, chaotic, beautiful life’: Rebecca Hall on race, regrets and learning to be herself

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Actor and director Rebecca Hall has always had to fight to define herself. Now, more comfortable than ever with where she is, she opens up about painting, working with Woody Allen, her BYO wedding – and her greatest indulgence

We all thought that we knew Rebecca Hall – English rose, on stage since childhood, daughter of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s founder Sir Peter Hall, regularly described in Hollywood as one of the best actors of her generation. But in 2021 she took what she calls now “a big swing” and suddenly the whole story cracked in half.

The big swing was her directorial debut, Passing, a film about two women of colour, one of whom is “passing” for white; Hall had been working on the story for 15 years, but thinking about it for far longer. Her maternal grandfather, a doorman from Detroit, passed as white, as did Hall’s mother the opera singer Maria Ewing, whose experience of growing up with internalised racism contributed to mental health issues that Hall had to navigate throughout her childhood. Her parents split when she was young and her mother brought her up alone in a grand country house in Sussex. But very little parenting was done – Hall (later head girl at school, later a Cambridge drop-out) was her mother’s caretaker. Because, “that kind of hiding [from who you are] leads to a certain amount of chaos. I think it’s safe to say that that stuff gets passed on. And I definitely grew up in an environment where my mother didn’t see me. She wanted me to be a certain kind of thing.”

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