In Presence, Chloe (Callina Liang) is the first to detect strange phenomena in the family’s new home.
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NEON
The haunted house thriller Presence has such a clever formal design that I’m surprised it hasn’t been done or attempted before. Maybe another movie has I did it which I am not aware of. This is a ghost story told entirely from the ghost’s point of view: we see what the ghost sees.
The ghost cannot leave the house, and so the film never leaves the house either. You could say the ghost is played by director Steven Soderbergh, who is, as usual, his own cinematographer, working under the pseudonym Peter Andrews. It’s Soderbergh who holds the camera as it runs up and down the stairs, following the characters from room to room and hovering over them as they try to figure out what’s going on.
As the film opens, Rebecca and Chris, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, are about to move into a beautiful Craftsman-style home with their two teenage children. The family dynamic is tense and a little elusive: Rebecca, a nervous person who works in finance, clearly favors their popular and athletic son, Tyler. Chris is the gentler spouse and parent, and he bonds closely with their daughter, Chloe, who is quieter and more withdrawn.
Even as we get to know this quartet, the most interesting and enigmatic character in the film is the silent specter behind the camera. You keep wondering who East this ghost, and what does he want? Is it the spirit of the house’s previous owner, or is it someone else who has an unspoken connection to the family?
Soon, paranormal things start happening. The ghost begins to manifest in physical ways, making lights flicker and walls shake, or dropping a cup of juice on the floor. Initially, only Chloe, played by Callina Liang, seems to notice these strange phenomena, and she tries in vain to inform her parents and Tyler of what is happening.
Tyler, played by Eddy Maday, is a bit of a hothead. He has little patience with his sister’s anxieties, which, we soon learn, are linked to a recent tragedy involving one of her best friends. Presence is not just a disturbing ghost story; It’s one of the most incisive recent films I’ve seen about the inner lives of teenagers, whether it’s their feelings of loneliness and disaffection or their vulnerability to high school gossip and worse.
Eventually, Chloe begins dating Ryan, a friend of Tyler’s, and there is a voyeuristic unease in the way the camera – that is, the ghost – eavesdrops on their intimate moments. There is nothing lascivious about these moments; on the contrary, what we feel is the ghost’s enormous concern for Chloe.
Soderbergh’s camera movements are so delicate and expressive that he can convey empathy with a simple twitch or shiver, or rage with a sudden, violent lurch. Soon we realize that the ghost isn’t trying to scare this family; he tries to warn them.
No American director produces independent films with as much skill and ingenuity as Steven Soderbergh. This is his latest collaboration with veteran screenwriter David Koepp, with whom he last worked on the home invasion thriller. Kimiwho ingeniously reinvented the Rear window in the age of Alexa and COVID.
As Kimibut in a completely different way, Presence makes brilliant use of spatial confinement and extracts maximum tension from a minimalist premise. As always, Soderbergh seems to have approached this material as a technical challenge, a problem to be solved: How TO DO you’re making a film entirely from a ghost’s point of view? Soderbergh has mentioned in interviews that he wore martial arts slippers, in order to muffle his footsteps as he chased his actors around the house with his camera. I’m not usually a fan of behind-the-scenes documentaries, but Presence is a film for which I would make an exception.
But even if Soderbergh evolves his technique, Presence it never feels like a simple exercise. This is mainly due to the excellent actors, especially Liang as the sensitive and troubled Chloe and Sullivan as a loving family man trying to keep the peace in a scary situation. Their performances are haunting in every sense of the word.
