Steven Soderbergh released two films this year: Black Bag, a juicy spy whodunit that’s very much in his wheelhouse, and Presence (now streaming on Hulu), an experimental narrative that’s, well, also very much in his wheelhouse. The filmmaker is best known for slickly stylish stuff like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s 11, but his alter-ego of sorts shoots on a smaller scale and is more playful with form, e.g., The Girlfriend Experience, Kimi, or Bubble. Presence is his first horror film, and it’s told entirely from the perspective of a ghost that appears to be trapped in a house, with Soderbergh handling the cinematography (under his Peter Andrews nom de plume). Which is to say, this isn’t traditional horror at all, much to the chagrin of gore fiends, no doubt.
PRESENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: I think it’s been established in many movies before this, that ghosts aren’t always trying to kill or dismember you or dump goo on your head. Sometimes, they just want to communicate something to the living, using limited means, e.g., going bump in the night, futzing with the lightswitch or knocking all your bowling trophies off the shelf. Such is the Presence in Presence, who we, well, do we “meet” it? We observe all the events of the film through its- well, does it have “eyes”? That doesn’t seem right. Seems more accurate to say we observe everything through its lens, which is wide-angled and distorted around the edges. Anyway, we observe this empty house through the Presence’s lens as it glides silently down hallways, through the kitchen and living room, up and down the stairs. One morning, a hurried realtor comes through the door, soon followed by a family of four. They buy the home.
Admittedly, I’m underplaying this a little. The youngest of the Payne family is the teenage Chloe (Callina Liang), who seems a bit detached on the initial tour – then, sensing something, she looks directly at the lens. Nobody else did that, not her type-A mother Rebekah (Lucy Liu), her nice-guy father Chris (Chris Sullivan) or brash bro of an older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday). Before they move in, the Presence watches some contractors paint the walls, and we learn that one of the guys won’t go in this room; he must’ve looked directly at the lens, too.
Once the Paynes move in, the Presence continues to observe and eavesdrop on them, and we learn the following: Two of Chloe’s friends recently died in an unnatural fashion – something vague about drug overdoses and dying in their sleep? – and that has something to do with why they moved. Rebekah appears to be a high-powered something-or-other who, it seems, might get a knock on the door from the FBI one of these days. Tyler is a champion swimmer, disempathetic toward his sister, and impatient with her psychological struggle – and notably, Mommy’s favorite, possibly because they both seem to be a-holes. Chris secretly calls a lawyer and asks what might happen if one’s spouse commits a big fat crime; he also repeatedly fights with Rebekah over her lack of involvement in Chloe’s struggles.
Tyler brings home a new friend, Ryan (West Caldwell), takes an interest in Chloe. Soon enough, he’s coming over just to see her, and drink her parents’ booze, and make out with her, while the Presence peers through the slats in the closet door. It makes itself known to Chloe, doing a little bookstacking (similar to the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947? I’m not sure!) and, in one instance, knocking down a shelf to disrupt Ryan and Chloe’s facemash. Chloe ruins dinner by telling the fam she senses the Presence in the house and the subsequent disagreement-based brouhaha is interrupted by the Presence, who promptly trashes Tyler’s room while the Paynes watch, jaws agape. Did things just break wide open? NO SPOILERS, cap’n!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: David Lowery’s A Ghost Story and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit are similar spooky-specter tales from big-name auteurs.
Performance Worth Watching: Liang gets the most screen time, and therefore a greater opportunity to show some dramatic flourishes; it’s a uniformly strong performance.
Memorable Dialogue: An atypically existential marital disagreement (here rendered vague without context):
Rebekah: It’s life.
Chris: Actually, it’s death.
Sex and Skin: Soft-focus schtup in the background of a shot.
Our Take: One will inevitably discuss the technique of Presence more than anything else, being a first-“person” POV narrative that never shifts its gaze, views everything through a fisheye lens and privy to abrupt time hops and cut-to-black edits. I admired its consistency, and how Soderbergh fashions the camera into a character defined primarily by how and what it observes. I can see how some may be frustrated by the director’s emphasis on inference over exposition; I wasn’t counting minutes, but its vagueness is tantalizing and annoying in roughly equal portions.
Do I reveal too much by saying that the scattered pieces of this plot don’t add up to anything tidy or easily understood? An apologist would assert that life (and death) is exactly that – messy, confounding, inexplicable. The life the Presence observes is typical domestic drama couched in extraordinary circumstances, e.g., Rebekah’s legal troubles and, of course, Chloe’s sensitivity to invisible undead entities that communicate through all the stereotypical means of haunted-house movies. The Payne family – should we note that their name isn’t the Happygoluckys or the Comfortingtons? – is divided down the middle between believers and skeptics, and as usual, the skeptics are jerks who are eventually forced to become believers who are jerks. Please, join me as I sigh deeply at this wearisome dynamic.
And the answers that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp provide deep in the third act don’t warrant a much more enthusiastic response. Characters tend to simplify instead of deepen as the story plays out, and the lack of substantive interplay between them makes it difficult to winnow out themes amidst all the ambiguity. The subtext seems to be buried in Presence’s technical presentation, which leaves us intrigued but chilly. Perhaps a second viewing would reveal more, but the movie is more of an underwhelming shrug and a curiosity than an experiment that reaches its full potential.
Our Call: Presence isn’t like other movies, and that should be applauded. Whether it’s satisfying for the audience is a different matter. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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