In some ways, this expansive Spanish language series improves on the Chilean family saga about a psychic girl and a military coup. But it mainly just feels old-fashioned and naive<\/p>\n
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\u2019s diaries, and realises that the horrors she\u2019s seen were always going to happen.<\/p>\n
Along with Alba\u2019s mother Blanca, these women are the three generations at the heart of Chilean novelist Isabel Allende\u2019s 1982 debut The House of the Spirits, previously the basis of a weirdly whitened movie starring Meryl Streep. Amazon\u2019s 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 \u2013 a cousin of the author \u2013 and replaced him with one of the 20th century\u2019s most vicious dictatorships.<\/p>\n
The House of the Spirits is on Prime Video.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/58ab817f43e10efb0071432501b705fc8955f147\/563_0_1875_1500\/master\/1875.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=19bae9743804f39ec1beeb6b3201a663\" "\\"The")
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