“Presence,” a ghost story directed by Steven Soderbergh, is ready fully inside a beautiful, renovated, 100-year-old suburban dwelling, and earlier than the characters also have a probability to maneuver in, the place is already occupied. The digicam actually appears to be peering at issues, staring out the second-floor home windows, then coming down the steps to witness the arrival of a harried real-estate agent, then the household of 4 she’s about to promote the home to. Darting from room to room in an unbroken wide-angle-lens shot, the digicam provides us an impromptu tour of the home, letting us drink within the crisp mint-green partitions, the classic wooden that traces all the pieces (home windows, doorways, stairway, hearth), the traditional smoke-glass mirror and polished oak-board flooring and chic sprawling kitchen. But that is no mere real-estate porn. For all the remainder of the film, Soderbergh employs that roving, bobbing and weaving voyeuristic digicam’s-eye view. “Presence” may simply be the very first ghost story wherein the ghost seems to be Brian De Palma’s cinematographer.
I exaggerate, although not by a lot. In “Presence,” we’re certainly taking in all the film from the point-of-view of the unseen spirit who has taken over the home. The spirit hovers and observes and all the time appears to know the place the motion is; nothing escapes its view. But on this case, the cinematographer is Soderbergh himself (capturing below the nom de plume Peter Andrews), and whereas he has shot a lot of his personal movies, going again to “Site visitors,” you get the sensation that a part of the enjoyable of “Presence” for Soderbergh was actually, by means of the self-esteem of the ghost, discovering a technique to be a part of within the motion, to grow to be a part of it and fuse with it.
But you may effectively ask: If the viewers is seeing all the pieces that the ghost sees, then how can the ghost scare us? That’s an excellent query, and whereas “Presence” sinks into an genuine household drama whose tentacles of intrigue are simply darkish sufficient to lure us in, it’s not an particularly scary film — no less than, not by the jump-scare requirements of the megaplex. The ghost in “Presence” likes to observe, however after some time it additionally does just a few issues, like lifting books and carrying them over to a desk (its lofting of a paperback seems to have been achieved with particular results borrowed from a teenage magician), or crashing a shelf down from the highest of a bed room closet. These teasing moments encourage you to assume that we is likely to be in retailer for some jitters on the extent of a great “Paranormal Exercise” sequel.
However no. The presence in “Presence” is generally — merely — a presence, and for lengthy stretches we virtually overlook it’s there; we’re simply watching a shoestring film shot with a somewhat nosy and flamboyant visible model. Soderberg levels every scene in an extended unbroken take, ending every one among them with a reduce to black. All very fashionable and percussive. But when he had made a model of this film with out the ghost-as-camera-eye conceit, it could have been roughly the identical film.
Paranormal exercise apart, this household has sufficient ghosts of its personal. The mom, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is a tightly wound management freak who runs all the pieces and performs favorites together with her youngsters (she’s the one who decides, within the house of 5 minutes, to buy the home, largely as a result of it’s within the coveted district that can permit the teenage son she dotes on to attend North Excessive College). Rebecca works at an indirect high-finance job wherein she’s dedicated some mysterious unlawful motion that would get them into sizzling water. Tyler (Eddy Maday), the son, is good on the floor however a mean-boy lout beneath, and his sister, Chloe (Calliana Liang), is falling right into a melancholy, although not simply because she’s entered the teen-blues tunnel. Her greatest buddy, Nadia, died just a few months earlier than of a drug overdose. (She’s the second woman in her faculty to have died that manner.) Chloe is the one member of the household who can sense the ghost’s presence, and Soderbergh doesn’t waste a lot time revealing why that’s. Because it seems, the ghost is there to not hang-out however to guard.
The factor about Soderbergh’s “little movies” is that they’re brash and ingenious and superior to what so many administrators might simply toss off. However you get the sensation that the principle purpose they exist is in order that Soderbergh can get pleasure from tinkering with them. That doesn’t sound like a foul philosophy of artwork or moviemaking, but he tends to throw these movies collectively in a manner that “works” (they carry you alongside) however that leaves no imprint. It’s as if he had been crafting a puzzle by making up items on the spot.
This one has a script by David Koepp, who additionally wrote Soderbergh’s “Kimi” (2022), which was a greater film. In “Presence,” the ghost concept is a foregrounded backdrop that yields neither main scares nor superior revelations. As a substitute, the movie locates its coronary heart of darkness squarely within the human world, particularly when Chloe will get drawn right into a sexualized friendship with Tyler’s buddy, performed with misleading masochistic creepiness by West Mullholland. He’s an excellent younger actor — and, in reality, all of the performing in “Presence” is ace. Calliana Liang rounds out Chloe’s despair, Lucy Liu makes Rebecca a duplicitous troublemaker who retains encouraging you to see what’s beneath the scheming, and I particularly preferred Chris Sullivan, who performs the beleaguered dad like a straitlaced Louis CK (he thinks he’s nonetheless in a world the place he can get his youngsters to cease swearing), with a falling-apart-at-the-seams desperation that speaks to an age when households don’t fairly communicate to one another.
“Presence,” in its showy angst, winks at topicality, in the identical manner that it winks at lot of different issues (like issues that go bump within the night time, or the rise of teenage psychological sickness, or serial killers). But it surely’s simply flirting with all of them. You need the film so as to add as much as one thing, however what it provides as much as is one other half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, solely this time he’s the ghost within the machine.
