La Casa de los Espíritus (The House of Spirits) on Prime.Amazon Prime/Supplied
A girl who can play piano without touching the keys. A dog stabbed at a wedding. A prostitute who starts a co-op of sex workers. A seven-fingered singer whose protest anthems inspire a revolution. Two babies born with green hair. Ghosts who return to kiss their loved ones goodbye. A mansion full of psychics, where “reality and dreams are easily confused, and the laws of physics or logic do not always apply.” Welcome to The House of the Spirits, the sumptuous, moving, eight-part limited series on Prime. It’s an adaptation fans of Isabel Allende’s masterpiece 1982 novel can rejoice in – shot in Chile, entirely in Spanish, with a primarily Latin American cast and crew, including showrunners Francisca Alegria and Fernanda Urrejola.
If ever there was a story that demanded eight parts, it’s Allende’s sprawling tale, which stirs magic realism into Chilean political and social history over four generations of powerful women. It begins in the late 1910s, as child Clara, who is clairvoyant, tags after her suffragist mother (“Suffrage is more than our right. It’s the recognition of our dignity”); continues as young woman Clara weds Esteban Trueba, a landowner who becomes a conservative politician, whose “virile energy and carnal nature” create ripple effects in countless lives; then follows older Clara, her daughter Blanca and granddaughter Alba as they are swept into Chile’s reform movement and the murderous 1973 military coup that quashed it.
Most of the characters are played by different actors as the decades progress, including Nicole Wallace and Dolores Fonzi as Clara. But Esteban is played throughout by Alfonso Herrera, the Mexican-born Latin American star best known here for his turn as the vicious Javi in Ozark. Allende herself lived parts of this story: Her father, Tomás, was first cousin to Salvador Allende, the reformist president of Chile elected in 1970 who died in the 1973 coup; and she, like her character Alba, helped dissidents find safe passage out of the country. Eventually her own life was threatened, and she escaped to Venezuela, where she wrote this book. (I highly recommend her appearance on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me. She’s funnier and looser than you might imagine.)
Though the novel was an instant best seller and remains a seminal achievement in 20th-century literature − 70 million copies sold in 40 languages – a proper adaptation was a long time coming. A 1993 film written and directed by Bille August, cast with mainly white actors (Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, Jeremy Irons), was a critical and box office failure and met with protests upon release. Various versions of a limited series have been in development since 2018. Eva Longoria came and went as the lead but is now an executive producer, along with Allende herself.
It was worth the wait. Allende’s themes, rich and dense, need this room to breathe: Sorrow and vengeance permeate generations. Poverty is hereditary. Charity is pointless without justice. Land itself can retain the memory of pain. Music, literature and sex are weapons of resistance as effective as any firearm. And you can love someone for years without realizing who they are.
The lighter, life-affirming sides of the story – its playfulness, droll sense of irony and expansive love – need and receive equal time, especially the magic realism. You can’t just drop in mystical events; to not be risible, they have to rise organically from character. This series doesn’t just expect people to understand why, for example, Clara keeps her mother’s head in a suitcase – it earns it.
Streep’s take on Clara was a rare misfire; she played her as an airy, childlike naif. The three actors who embody Clara in the series are stronger, with wide open faces and their feet on the ground. Their psychic powers don’t overtake them – they own them.
Allende’s understanding of and love for women is the beating, bleeding heart of this story – the pain and injustice they carry, how they see and support one another, the light and love they manage to sustain. (The three main characters’ names are all plays on lightness: Clara/clear, Blanca/white, Alba/dawn.) Much of what happens to them is extremely hard to watch. Women are whipped, raped and tortured, and though the camera doesn’t linger exploitatively on those moments, the impact is profound. But they persevere.
Being able to see the future, Clara writes in the cache of diaries that inspires Alba to become an author, doesn’t mean you can influence it. While we’re busy living our lives, we can’t always see the relationship between events or measure the consequences of our actions. But recording the truth can be a kind of salvation.
This story endures because the darkness never overwhelms the light. The women characters won’t allow it to. “How lucky to have the ability to feel so intensely,” Clara says, soothing one of Blanca’s sorrows. “Not everyone can.”