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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Streaming: Thelma and the best films about old-age rebellion

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June Squibb’s star turn as a ninetysomething gran, scammed and out for justice, joins a club of indomitable seniors in the movies, from Anne Reid to Jack Nicholson

June Squibb’s career has run on a different timeline to that of most movie stars: she made her film debut, in Woody Allen’s Alice, at the age of 60, and it was another 23 years before she landed her breakthrough role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Her performance as an embittered pensioner who saltily badmouths past acquaintances and flashes the gravestone of an ex got her an Oscar nomination. It also got her a run of progressively less amusing naughty-granny roles. In Hollywood, older people can be blandly comforting support or quirky joke fodder but not much more.

In Thelma, however, the now 95-year-old Squibb gets her first leading role, as a phone-scam victim tracking down those who robbed her, and adds some welcome human shading to the pensioner-behaving-badly stereotype. Its heroine may ride a scooter on her quest for justice, but Josh Margolin’s film avoids cheap jokes of the old-people-say-the-darnedest things variety, and amid its generally cheery tone makes some sharp points about how society patronises and shortchanges its senior citizens.

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