Photograph: Amazon MGM Studios
Clara del Valle is a delightful little girl, all smiles and plaits and cheeky interruptions during boring sermons at Mass. Her large family, enjoying life in their sprawling house in 1920s Chile, dote on her. But her psychic powers can be a buzzkill: when she gets a premonition that death is coming, come it will. Half a century later, her granddaughter Alba discovers Clara’s diaries, and realises that the horrors she’s seen were always going to happen.
Along with Alba’s mother Blanca, these women are the three generations at the heart of Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s 1982 debut The House of the Spirits, previously the basis of a weirdly whitened movie starring Meryl Streep. Amazon’s expansive eight-parter, filmed in Spanish and indeed in Chile and executive produced by Eva Longoria, is a more faithful version of a book that begins as a sprawling family saga before pitching the reader into a stream of violence that concludes with a fictionalised account of the coup that removed the socialist Chilean leader Salvador Allende – a cousin of the author – and replaced him with one of the 20th century’s most vicious dictatorships.
