Presence

“Presence” is a tale about the dead that was directed by a versatile film maker Steven Soderbergh, and takes place entirely in this beautiful restored over 100 years old house located in suburbia, and even before the characters even have a chance to move in, it is occupied already.

The gazing through the camera directly looks as it were upon second floor staring through the windows, then going downstairs, together with the harried attractive real-estate agent and then insisting upon her four member family to whom she is going to sell the house.

The doctor, who is shooting darting about the rooms and back and about in a sweeping shot uninterrupted room with a wide angle lens, showed us the interiors of the house at blinding speed, and to our delight, the walls are dressed in the color of mint parakeets, all the wood accents, windows, doors, staircases, fireplace are brown, the evocative smoked glass, polished oak board floor and spacious smart kitchen.

Nevertheless, this isn’t just passive consumption of property videos. Therefore, for the rest of the film, Soderbergh will adopt this tracking and grazing peeping tom outlook. Inverted commas, ‘Presence’. the very first ghost film that is embellished with the ghost of Brian De Palma’s cinematographer.

I approach an exaggeration, at least, not that much. In “Presence,” all of the movie is seen from the point-of-view of a ghost who has invaded the house. The spirit flies around and watches and always knows where the action is going; nothing goes past him.

However, in this instance the cinematographer is Soderbergh himself (who now shoots under the nickname of Peter Andrews), and although he has been operating a camera on real time documentation of the screen plays since Traffic, you feel that part of the fun of the movie Presence for Soderbergh was, quite literally, looking for a way how to get into action using a conceit of a ghost.

Yet you might well ask: If the audience is seeing everything that the ghost sees, then how can the ghost scare us? This is rather a good question, and while “Presence” sinks in into a genuine melodrama whose complications are just murky enough to seduce us, it’s not tremendously frightening – at least not compared to the ‘sudden scare’ benchmarks of the megaplex.

The ghost in “Presence” does enjoy observing in silence, but after some time, it gets a bit more hands-on and has to be seen performing actions such as grabbing the books and placing them on the work desk (rather clumsy looking special effects of someone lifting a book were probably borrowed from your average teenage magician) or smashing a book shelf down from inside a bedroom wardrobe. These annoying bits didn’t escape your notice, which means that there may be relatively soon more a la “Paranormal activity” than its subjects and themes will comprise today.

But no. The presence in “Presence” is mostly — merely — presence and for long periods we are so engrossed in other factors that we almost don’t notice it’s there; we are just watching a shoestring movie shot in a very intrusive and flamboyant style. Soderberg models the camera on long scene-length takes and he ends every one of these takes with a cut to black. Everything so stylish and more strikingly and percussively structural. Yet had he made this version of the movie without the ghost as camera eye gimmick, it would be pretty much the same.

Putting aside the supernatural elements, the family still has enough family history to fill in the genealogy pages. Rebecca (Lucy Liu) emerges as an emotionally cold, professionally gifted perfectionist who imposes discriminatory treatment of the children. She is an obscure high-finance specialist who has been embroiled in something shady which is further likely to cave them to trouble.

Like all characters, Tyler (Eddy Maday), the son, is charming at first, but he is really an uncaring mean-boy cretin, while their daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), does not lack interest, but is more and more going to a state of depression, not least because she just crossed the threshold of the horrible adolescent blues drama. About a couple of months back, her closest companion, Nadia, tangled with drugs, and is gone now (she’s also the second girl in that school to have died that way).

Chloe is the only one who can feel the spirit in the family compartment, and Soderbergh doesn’t delay in explaining why so. And it is at this point that one discovers the second piece of information, that it is not so much that the ghost is there for venting out the wrath but more of there to offer defense.

One thing which can be said about Soderbergh’s ‘little films’ is they are outrageous and energetic and are much better than what a lot of directors can whip up. It strikes you as the primary reason they are made is for Soderbergh to have fun playing around with them.

That doesn’t seem to be a bad attitude towards either art or making movies, but he has a tendency to smash these pieces around in a way that ‘works’ (they pull you in) but leaves no footprint. It is almost as if he were making up pieces to a puzzle as he was putting the puzzle together only he would be in charge of making all of the pieces as well.

Here’s the screenplay written by David Koepp, who also scripted Soderbergh’s much better “Kimi” (2022). In “Presence,” this ghost idea features largely in the background but does not provide any scares or any big surprises. Instead, this movie places its heart of darkness in the human world and especially in Chloe’s sexualized friendship with Tyler’s friend, played by West Mullholland, with masochistic creepiness. He’s a very good young actor and in fact, all the acting in “Presence” is ace.

In “Presence”, Callina Liang, together with Chloe’s haggard cast, portrays despair. Hapless, reasonable scholarship hastily welcomes Rebecca is played by Lucy Liu – a scheming femme fatale who lures you into her web and stays there for quite some time dangling the charming face of reason beneath the scheming, and the character who impressed me most is Chris Sullivan a weary dad, played like a straightened Louis CK (so innocent that he thinks it is still possible to make sitting kids stop using foul language), with a timeless and fitting look about decay when entire families no longer share quite enough discourse with each other.

In its ostentatious angst, ‘Presence’ is abashed by the need for relevance compatible with the theme as obviously is the case with many other things (like things that offends lonesome girls – teenagers who are ill, or the rise of serial killers).

But it’s just flirting with all of them. It’s tempting all the time to try and justify why the film would eventually justify such effort. But all it adds up to is one more rather mediocre, half-absorbing, half-pleasure Soderbergh trinket, this time, however, Soderbergh exited the stage and began to control the mechanisms of creation.

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