Movie Reviews

Movie Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Supernatural Ghost Story “Presence” Works Extremely Well

A family becomes convinced they are not alone after moving into their new home in the suburbs.

Steven Soderbergh has been playing around with the different aspects of filmmaking for decades now. His filmography includes Oscar winners, audience winners, franchises, reboots of his own franchises, and plenty of respect across the board. Being the industrious filmmaker he is, he uses that cultural cache instead of building it up to do something noble: experiment. Whether it’s cutting his own marketing materials (“Logan Lucky”), shooting on an iPhone (“Unsane”), shooting an entire movie on wide angle lenses (“No Sudden Move”), or navigating the streaming world to release films day-and-date (“Kimi”), he’s never stopped playing with the business models and aesthetic practices of conventional cinema. His latest film, “Presence,” continues this tradition with an interesting story choice: filming an entire haunted house movie from the ghost’s perspective. His experimental films often land somewhere in between stellar storytelling and formalistic exercise. More than anything, I continually admire his efforts at making original films, bringing up new cast members, and getting ‘the reps in’ when it comes to storytelling. “Presence,” while intriguing in concept, delivers a by-the-books movie with a unique idea but also a solid finale that lets its actors really play.

“Presence” follows a family as they move into a new household closer to a better school district so golden son Tyler can have higher odds of gaining college tuition. His younger sister, Chloe, needs a fresh start after two of her friends mysteriously die in separate drug overdoses. Lucy Liu plays the family’s matriarch, Rebekah, who is engaged in some shady money dealings. Her husband Chris, played by Chris Sullivan (you might recognize him as the fry cook Benny in “Stranger Things: Season One”) plays the more empathetic of the two parents. Where Rebekah focuses on Tyler’s success and neglects Chloe, he nurtures and listens to her when she suspects something otherworldly haunts their house. These hauntings build over time until the entire family collides in shouting matches, rivaling some of the most vicious moments.

The film is shot in long takes, sweeping across the house in chunks of scenery, following different actors through separate scenes. It’s a little like those theater events where each room contains a different scene, all telling the story, and only the cameras are allowed to cut to black from time to time and jump forward. This allows Soderbergh and the team to cut through time and build up this mysterious haunting. It’s a cloying feeling, knowing they’re haunted and wishing to reach out and yell at them. It aligns us, the audience, with the ghost and convinces us that the haunting may be malignant. We’ll find out, over time, that the ghost was put there for a purpose they can’t remember but must fulfill—a destiny foretold by a spirit medium.

The four leads of this movie carry the entire thing. I mean, Callina Liang and Eddy Maday, as Chloe and Tyler do most of the heavy lifting. Young actors with few screen credits to their name deserve to work on complicated projects like this with directors like Soderbergh. This was how we built up new talent and tested new ideas. They work well with their adult counterparts. It’s wild to see Lucy Liu in such a restrained atmosphere after the career she’s had, and any fault in her performance might be for expecting something overly dramatic to occur at any moment. The truth is this film centers on the emotional tragedy of this family. Its ghosts are of its own devising. In that sense, everything except the ghost is firmly rooted in regular drama until the very end.

The gentle seesawing motion of the film between developing this family’s story more and haunting them can lull from time to time. The longer swathes of emotional drama help, but they don’t lead to many actual plot events since they exist outside the house. Things that imply there will be consequences only carry emotional strain on our talent, which in turn fuels the haunting. There are lots of stories told but only one real plotline. In the final ten minutes, it all comes to a head while the parents are away. It culminates in some chilling beats hinting at sexual violence and truly terrifying events before finally revealing the ghost and its destined purpose.

“Presence” feels more in line with the smaller budget wave of movies in the early aughts. It made its theatrical presence (ha!) known in a dead month before landing on Blockbuster shelves and maybe farming out, eventually, to SciFi’s horror weekend programming. It’s light on horrifying and heavy on emotionally terse. More than anything, I love seeing new talent get the reps in, and Soderbergh continues to flex on the industry by spending the capital he earns every time he turns in an “Ocean’s Eleven” or an “Erin Brockovich.”

In Theaters Friday, January 24th

 

 

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