There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.
Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.
Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 