Steven Soderbergh is the master puppeteer, and we’re all dancing on his strings. He takes a unique, first-person ghost perspective on a haunted house story – and watches sparks fly. It takes the familiar tropes of a family moving into a haunted house and sees secrets unfold from that point on – but the ghost isn’t the enemy; in this sense, and that quickly becomes apparent the more the film, only eighty-five minutes, shows – it’s an exercise in essentialism, not a rare moment of overwrought, wasted filler moments – everything is trimmed, cut to the brim. In a moment of time where auteurs like John Waters are struggling to get movies financed, Soderbergh is one of those last creatives who’s able to get whatever money he needs together to make whatever project he wants to – and whilst this won’t be regarded as the best of them, it’s a solid genre effort.
Soderbergh is on top of the moment from the word go – constantly reinventing himself and his take on the haunted house genre is fresh and exciting. It’s not the “scariest movie of the year” – in fact, it isn’t even scary at all – but that’s what makes Presence so unique. There’s nothing outside the house, we only see what’s outside through windows and only briefly. It’s action entirely around its central family – played wonderfully by Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan – a more ambitious mother vs. a religious, WASP-raised dad leads to an instant clash of personalities, and the young but grieving Chloe, who is played by Callina Liang, clashes with her rebellious loser of a brother – Carl – played by Eddy Maday – who is high-achieving, but reportedly comes with a mean streak, according to his new friend, Ryan, the hot, popular kid at school – played by West Mulholland. It’s a small cast and each feel like distinctively real people across the board – perhaps across eighty-five minutes, one of the film’s biggest achievements. In one room, Liu’s Rebecca, family matriarch, protects her hotshot son with the future ahead of him – in the next, Chris helps his daughter through the grieving process of losing two close friends, whilst considering his worth in the marriage and why it’s worth staying at all.
It feels like a film designed to avoid the expectations that the marketing placed on it – it’s not horror; not scary, and it never tries to be – it’s a very sombre and reflective exploration of trauma and I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed by the way the film’s distributor, NEON, have marketed it out to be otherwise. Soderbergh the inventor with the camera will leave you asking questions about how they pulled off certain shots – like the book tidying scene – for days. It’s not a horror movie – so to advertise it as such would feel more cheating than not advertising it as one, and the ending may have been obvious in hindsight, but it’s something that feels oh-so-satisfying when they get there.
Chloe is the first person to notice the ghost. She believes her best friend has followed her here – in ghost form, but for what and for what purpose? Christian, spiritual, is more convinced than Rebecca, and the clash of parental personalities comes out from there. It’s a nuclear family – the dynamic is toxic in the siblings’ personalities and Christian recognises that from his own flaws as a sibling, and tries to get Chloe to have patience with Carl. They’re the kind of family that you think is an all-American from the outside, but it becomes clear within seconds that they’re not – nobody’s perfect, and enter Ryan, as the disrupter who threatens to bring it all into the ground. Rebecca is too busy to notice what’s going on before her eyes – either by choice or by work – and the fractured family unit would provide a story with enough meat on its bones in itself. Yet to add a ghost and the power of developing and pushing through trauma – sometimes noticed, sometimes not, as Chloe pushes through her sadness alone – elevates Presence into unimaginably good territory – lacking in cheap jump scares but incredibly better because of that. Four people walked out before the title card at a surprise screening – but they missed out on an early-year highlight.
