Hal Kitchen
I respect the way Steven Soderbergh works. I just wish it more often translated into great movies. Despite producing a string of big budget, Oscar-winning studio hits throughout the late ’90s and early ’00s, the remarkably prolific Soderbergh has increasingly shied away from major studio releases, instead directing films with smaller budgets, a handful of stars, and a smartphone. His is the pattern of a born director, someone who just makes whatever films he can, however he can, as often as he can, with whatever means at his disposal, working in a range of genres. Before this very film, we got a trailer for his next film Black Bag, a sexy espionage thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett at a married couple of assassins. How cool is that? Promoting your next film while your last is opening in theaters! It’s just a shame that, for the most part, Soderbergh’s films range from mediocre to decent. Sure he made Sex, Lies and Videotape thirty five years ago and that’s a stone-cold classic, everyone loves Out of Sight and his Solaris remake was better than anyone had any right to expect, but the bulk of his filmography is made up of middling Oscar-bait dramas, slick but forgettable thrillers, quirky comedic misfires and Magic Mike movies. He seems like a guy whose work ethic often outstrips his creativity. It is in light of this then that I am especially pleased to champion Presence as his most creative film in over twenty years!
Presence is first and foremost a ghost story with a gimmick and that gimmick is that it is shot entirely through the POV of the ghost, a suturing effect achieved surprisingly well by filming with an extreme wide-angle lens. As with most of his films, Soderbergh pulls double duty as camera operator so he is effectively playing the ghost himself. It’s a terrific effect, the ghost is simultaneously “the ghost”, the camera, the filmmaker, and the audience—and it’s used to create some savvy moments like when a medium shows up and seems faintly aware of the camera. At times we forget that there is “a presence” where we are, and get a shock when one of the characters suddenly reacts to us. As you might expect though, it’s not especially conducive to horror, and no, although there are moments that are genuinely disturbing, Presence is not a haunted house movie in the way most ghost stories are. Nor however is it the slow-burn existential odyssey that David Lowery’s masterpiece A Ghost Story was. Rather, writer David Koepp (of Jurassic Park and Spider-Man fame) uses the conceit to focus on the relationships between the dysfunctional family members who move into the haunted home.
Mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu) is often tied up in some nefarious business practice and when she’s not she’s showering adulation on her golden child, swim captain Tyler (Eddy Maday), to the frustration of her downtrodden husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) who’s approaching the end of his patience. He’s more concerned with their troubled teenage daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), as is the presence in the house. It seems to be Chloe’s room in particular that is haunted, and she does indeed seem to have the closest relationship to death of any of her family, having just lost her best friend Nadia to an apparent drug overdose. Chris is concerned Chloe might go down the same path, but Rebecca dismisses his concerns, saying she just needs time, something Chris points out as an extremely convenient thing to believe when you are a mother who doesn’t want to take an interest in your daughter.
The ghostly camera gimmick could have worn extremely thin as the film went on. However, Soderbergh and Koepp use that early grace period wisely so that just as we might otherwise lose interest, we discover how invested we are in this unhappy family. All four leads give terrific performances, and although the characters often feel like bold archetypes of the kind you’d turn up in a Stephen King novel, they’re played with sufficient understanding and confidence to feel believable. Huge credit too to Koepp who polished up some gems in the script, we really feel how considered some of the dialogue is—Chris’s lines especially—you really feel for him as the adult in the room, and the only person really trying to keep this family from falling apart.
Presence‘s intimacy is a real strength, and there’s a real cleverness, too: none of its twists feel cheap or obvious, and they all land right where they’re supposed to, slowly drawing you closer to the edge of your seat as we near the chilling climax. I’ve said that Presence isn’t a typical horror movie and no, it’s not frightening exactly, we’re cued in pretty early on that whatever this ghost is, it’s not malicious, is merely lonely and trying to connect with Chloe, to reach her somehow, but that doesn’t mean there’s not real horror to be found here. In the final moments—that last scream from Liu—you know what it’s building towards by then and yet it is still absolutely bone-chilling.
