‘Presence’ movie review: a good idea only in theory
There has been a marked willingness from filmmakers in recent years to experiment within the horror genre. Fittingly, it was only a matter of time before Steven Soderbergh, Hollywood’s most prolific experimentalist, threw his hat in the ring. After all, he is the maverick who shot several films entirely on an iPhone and adopted digital cameras long before many of his contemporaries. Though he has dabbled in horror-adjacent material before with 2018’s Unsane, Presence is a much more straight-down-the-middle horror concept: a haunted house story. Naturally, though, Soderbergh is anything but straightforward in executing that concept – and that’s not always a good thing.
In its early going, Presence introduces the audience to the family who will be living in that haunted house. It pretty quickly becomes apparent that the family is struggling, and a clear divide has formed: the workaholic mother (Lucy Liu) and son Tyler (Eddy Maday) on one side; the father who is trying to hold everyone together (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) on the other. Something tragic has clearly happened in Chloe’s life, and she has caused issues for the family in the past, leaving clear resentment emanating from her mother and brother. Then, Chloe begins to sense a spectral presence in the house.
From the very start, the form of Presence is made clear: the film is shot entirely from the ghost’s perspective. In an effective opening scene that brings to mind the classic opening tracking shot from John Carpenter’s Halloween, the camera moves around the empty house before realtor Julia Fox shows up. It swoops quickly in and out of rooms, up and down stairs, lingering at windows to look outside before retreating to a closet in what will become Chloe’s room.
It’s a neat opening salvo that bodes well for the rest of the film. However, when the family moves in and the presence begins following them around and quietly watching their conversations from a voyeuristic distance, it becomes apparent that Presence isn’t really attempting to be scary. Instead, it’s trying to be a slow-burn chiller. Writer David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), with whom Soderbergh previously created the excellent Kimi, drip-feeds the details of Chloe’s past to the audience, as well as hinting at some sort of dodgy dealings that Liu’s character may have been involved in.
Unfortunately, nothing the family says to each other is particularly interesting, and the story does take a cliche turn or two. The acting is solid across the board, if nothing spectacular, with Liang probably equipping herself best as a sad, confused teen whose family doesn’t believe her when she claims her dead friend is haunting their home. It all means that the movie lives and dies on the conceit of the audience being in the ghost’s perspective for the entire 85-minute film – and that gets old very quickly.
While watching the film, it’s hard not to think Presence was a better idea in theory than it is in execution. The concept of watching a ghost story where the audience is put in the invisible shoes of the spectre is undoubtedly intriguing, but it isn’t very compelling in practice. In the end, it winds up looking and feeling not unlike a found-footage movie – but because the audience isn’t seeing through the eyes of a character holding a camera who can actually influence proceedings, it becomes very tedious.
It’s evident that the conceit of a silent witness following a family going about their day is meant to make the audience feel complicit in some way, but all it does is highlight the film’s un-reality. Presence doesn’t feel like a realistic cinematic insight into the home life of a broken family. Instead, it feels like an experimental theatre piece that highlights its own artifice at all times.
Ultimately, perhaps Presence proves that putting an audience in the POV of the ostensible antagonist is a neat idea that can work well for a sequence or two. However, it’s a tough pill to swallow for a whole film, even one as short as this. In horror movies, the fear generally comes from the audience and the characters not knowing where the danger is coming from, and when you remove that element, all you’re left with is a failed experiment.
