Review by Zach Dennis
There’s a ghost in the house. The family can feel it, a high-pitched noise reverberates against the mirror, and objects fall from the shelves. They can’t see it because it’s us.
In Presence, the latest from Steven Soderbergh, the audience takes the position of the ghost. Gliding around the room, Soderbergh’s camera works as the haunt – less as an evil entity, more like an essence of grief.
Chloe (Callina Liang) and her family have moved to a new home. She is suffering from depression after the death of a friend and her parents think this could be the change she needs. From the start, we can tell that Chloe can feel the spirit over the others. We, as the spirit, peer into their lives; generally in close proximity.
Soderbergh takes us into these intimate moments: Mom (Lucy Liu) seems impatient over Chloe’s demeanor and embroiled in legal troubles at work, Dad (Chris Sullivan) is concerned for his daughter and increasingly frustrated with his wife and son’s indifference, and Tyler (Eddie Maday) is locked into school and swimming – aggressively hoping for Chloe to just stop. They continue their lives, unaware of the watching eyes around them.
The easiest comparison to be made is The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise. Both films aren’t interested in jump scares, but in a growth of horror from the uncertainty. Where Presence takes it up a level is in absorbing the other and as moments pass with some continuity, the scene plays out in one-take fragments – not always full.
The close up to intimate moments is terrifying in our invasion of privacy. Another movie this conjures up is A Ghost Story, directed by David Lowery. There, the tragedy followed by the passage of time, is beautiful and haunting. It isn’t just that his partner must move on without him after his death, but the prison of inhabiting the space for eternity.
We can get further away from tragedy, but it can sometimes linger longer, glomming onto the infrastructure around us; absorbing energy from us. I don’t think Presence ever gets there or at least not as much as I had hoped, but it scratches that itch of unsettling and not frightening that both do.