Presence Is the Best Thing Steven Soderbergh’s Done in Ages

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Originally released for viewing on January 20, 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival, this review is being shared again coinciding with the theatrical debut of Presence.

In a refreshing twist, Steven Soderbergh’s film “Presence” offers a haunted house narrative from the perspective of the ghost. This production blends Soderbergh’s continuous experimentation with form and conventional genre elements. Although the plot may echo familiar territory, the manner in which it is filmed is anything but ordinary. The camera wanders through rooms, orbits around actors, swiftly climbs stairs, and peeks out windows – often capturing an entire scene in a single take. Though this presence remains unseen by characters, they occasionally feel its presence, imbuing each scene with an engaging sense of uncertainty.

In contrast, the plotline appears deliberately routine. A family purchases a new home, and it doesn’t take long for one of its members to sense unusual happenings while the others remain unaware. This time around, it’s Chloe (played exceptionally by Callina Liang), the mournful teenage daughter still grappling with her best friend Nadia’s tragic overdose death. Chloe has a feeling that something is amiss. She senses an entity lurking in her wardrobe. The books she leaves scattered on her bed mysteriously end up neatly organized on her desk. Chloe begins to believe that this spectral presence could be her deceased friend Nadia, reaching out from the other side. Her father, Chris (portrayed by Chris Sullivan), worries she might require a different medication and therapist. His preoccupied wife, Rebekah (Lucy Liu), believes she simply needs to move on. Notably, Rebekah is more engrossed in her athletic son Tyler (Eddy Maday), who also maintains a distance from Chloe. At one point, Chris reminds Rebekah, “We have two kids.

In my opinion, I’ve noticed that some films like to switch perspectives to that of the ghost, killer, or monster for a touch of visual drama and suspense. Dario Argento mastered this concept in his iconic giallo films, while Sam Raimi made it the defining characteristic of low-fi aesthetics in his Evil Dead series. Stanley Kubrick also experimented with it in The Shining. However, Soderbergh doesn’t casually employ this technique as a director’s whim; instead, he sustains the ghostly viewpoint throughout the entire movie. This makes the presence of the camera, its movements, and where it chooses to focus no longer just stylistic choices, but narrative and thematic elements that need to be deciphered.

Typically, Steven Soderbergh, who is known as Peter Andrews in the credits, is actually the one behind the camera, a dual role that makes his presence more than just a director; he’s also a performer. During the post-premiere Q&A at Sundance, the actors mentioned the unusual sensation of working closely with Soderbergh in each scene, feeling his intense involvement as if he were another actor, constantly nearby, breathing down their necks, and then rushing upstairs “in his martial arts slippers,” camera still in hand, to capture the rapid changes in the ghost’s perspective.

In essence, the enigmatic apparition of the ghost serves as a symbol for the filmmaker’s control within the cinematic frame, hinting at the intrinsic sadistic-voyeuristic aspects that permeate not just this film but cinema overall, and particularly genre films. The director is omnipresent yet detached, compelling characters to act while creating an illusion of their own free will. It may appear as highbrow film theory jargon, but the theme of covert manipulation, the exercise of power over seemingly autonomous entities, plays a pivotal role in the narrative itself. Disclosing additional details would spoil some crucial plot twists in the third act.

In the movie ‘Presence‘, jump scares are not abundant, causing some curiosity about how audiences will perceive it when it’s promoted as low-budget fright fare (with vivid mental images of trailers). However, it doesn’t shy away from horror aspects, and David Koepp’s script often seems tailored to audience anticipations and encounters. For instance, before the family moves in, when we learn that one of the house painters refused to enter a specific room, it’s easy to comprehend the reason and the eerie situation at hand. The film isn’t afraid to follow a predictable narrative path because it compensates with striking visuals. It’s a piece of art that effectively serves as a chilling horror film, and it could be one of Steven Soderbergh’s finest works in recent years.

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2025-01-16 16:53