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, even months after viewing.
Presence is the latest entry, then, in a subset of films set in a house that gradually takes on a life and personality of its own – not just a vivid or spectacular set, but a space that begins to dictate proceedings as much as any of the human characters’ actions. Horror cinema is, of course, particularly conducive to this kind of building control – a genre where every cranny is a potential threat or refuge.
The layout of the tall, grimly teetering Bates residence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is also indelible, with much terror contained in the festering lifelessness of its dusty corridors, basement and central, hazardous staircase. Before it was diluted with manifold sequels and spin-offs, James Wan’s original The Conjuring effectively multiplied the malevolent possibilities of American gothic architecture with a hidden maze of traps, tunnels and chutes: a haunted mansion as a snakes-and-ladders board. The titular structure of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s landmark 1977 horror House(BFI Player) is likewise conflicted: a heightened fairytale cottage that eventually all but drips blood.
Not that a house needs to be quite so old or grandiose to carry this power. David Bruckner’s underrated 2021 spine-tingler The Night House is in thrall to the clean modernist lines and open spaces of a lakeside dream home built by the late architect husband of Rebecca Hall’s unravelling protagonist as she finds herself unable to shake his literal design for life. The flat, unremarkable proportions of the suburban craftsman house occupied by a tragedy-burdened family of Ari Aster’s Hereditary seem to stretch and sprawl to contain their unending grief: the home is shrunk and replicated in dioramas and miniatures by Toni Collette’s brittle matriarch, but she still can’t command it.
Away from outright horror, the right (or wrong) house can still come with an uncanny aura. The obvious example is Hitchcock’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s romantic psychodrama Rebecca (Filmzie), which honoured the novel’s lavish descriptions of the sumptuous, labyrinthine Manderley, and the mental burden that its scale and decor places on its young new mistress. A kind of American Manderley is the darkly looming mansion owned by Guy Pearce’s tortured capitalist in Brady Corbet’s recent The Brutalist, a relic of an old order briefly disrupted and illuminated by modernist renovation – that highly covetable library designed by Adrien Brody’s immigrant architect ought alone to have won the film a production design Oscar – before sinking back into old-money murk.
The immaculately appointed but soul-free colonial rectangle shared by Annette Bening’s uptight estate agent and Kevin Spacey’s increasingly louche wastrel in American Beauty isn’t as lofty, but equally feels like a bricks-and-mortar monument to a soured American dream: all boxy conformity behind rose-lined picket fences, proudly maintained by one, chafed against by the other, suffocating all inside.
The enviable, magazine-ready chicness of the exquisite city pad that houses most of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is just as claustrophobic in its own way, and indicative of money as power: a space that traps servants and masters alike in its immaculate, angular cocoon. See also the gliding concrete curves and glassy surfaces of Oscar Isaac’s futuristic tech-bro lair in Ex Machina, or the brutalist geometry of Tom Hiddleston’s vertiginous Barbican-style flat in High-Rise: both remote fortresses of masculine privilege that are ultimately trashed by restless, untidy new orders.
A rare example of modern architecture used to entirely romantic ends in film is the beguilingly corny 2006 fantasy The Lake House, in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are separated by time in a luxe waterside home whose sleek lines and impeccable views they share – two strangers cosmically bound by good taste in property.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
No Other Land
(Channel 4 online)
Fresh from its well-deserved Oscar win for best documentary, this shattering first-hand view of Palestinian lives displaced by Israel’s West Bank occupation – made by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli activists – bristles with political anger and urgency. It’s also, though, warmly humane in its examination of home, family and forging friendships across cultural lines.
The Lion in Winter
(StudioCanal)
Once much lauded but somewhat outmoded these days, this 1968 historical talkfest gets a sleek 4K restoration that dusts the cobwebs off its heated chamber drama between Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine – played by Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn with such peak-form sauce and vinegar that the film’s stiffer trappings hardly matter.
Wicked
(Universal)
At last, a physical Blu-ray release to delight the many obsessive cultists of this Wizard of Oz spin-off, who can watch it repeatedly until part two – Wicked: Ever More – arrives in cinemas in November. They’re unlikely to agree with me that small-screen viewing amplifies the flaws of this lavishly mounted but stiflingly overstretched villain origin story, performed with plucky can-do spirit by all involved.
Source: theguardian.com
