Tag: Masterful

In Presence, Chloe (Callina Liang) is the first to pick up on strange phenomena in the family’s new home.

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The haunted-house thriller Presence has a formal conceit so clever, I’m surprised it hasn’t ever been done or attempted before. Maybe another movie has done it that I’m not aware of. This is a ghost story told entirely from the ghost’s point of view: We see what the ghost sees.

The ghost cannot leave the house, and so the movie never leaves the house, either. You could say that the ghost is played by the director, Steven Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer, as usual, working under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews. That’s Soderbergh holding the camera as it glides up and down the stairs, following the characters from room to room, and hovering over them as they try to figure out what’s going on.

As the movie opens, Rebecca and Chris, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, are about to move into a handsome Craftsman-style house with their two teenage children. The family dynamics are tense and a little on-the-nose: Rebecca, a high-strung type who works in finance, clearly favors their popular, jockish son, Tyler. Chris is the mellower spouse and parent, and he has a close bond with their daughter, Chloe, who’s quieter and more withdrawn.

Even as we get to know this foursome, though, the movie’s most interesting and enigmatic character is the silent specter behind the camera. You keep asking yourself, who is this ghost, and what does it want? Is it the spirit of the house’s previous owner, or is it someone else entirely, who has some unspoken connection with the family?

Before long, paranormal things start to happen. The ghost begins manifesting itself in physical ways, making the lights flicker and the walls rattle, or knocking a cup of juice to the floor. Initially, only Chloe, played by Callina Liang, seems to notice these strange phenomena, and she tries in vain to tell her parents and Tyler about what’s happening.

Tyler, played by Eddy Maday, is a bit of a hothead. He has little patience with his sister’s anxieties, which, we soon learn, are tied to a recent tragedy involving one of her best friends. Presence isn’t just an unsettling ghost story; it’s one of the more incisive recent movies I’ve seen about the inner lives of teenagers, whether it’s their feelings of loneliness and disaffection or their vulnerability to high-school gossip and worse.

Eventually, Chloe begins dating Ryan, a friend of Tyler’s, and there’s a voyeuristic queasiness to the way the camera — which is to say, the ghost — eavesdrops on their moments of intimacy. There’s nothing prurient about these moments; on the contrary, what you feel is the ghost’s enormous concern for Chloe.

Soderbergh’s camera movements are so delicate and expressive, he can convey empathy with a mere twitch or shudder, or rage with a sudden, violent lurch. Before long, we realize that the ghost isn’t trying to scare this family; it’s trying to warn them.

No American director is churning out independent movies as deftly and resourcefully as Steven Soderbergh. This is his latest collaboration with the veteran screenwriter David Koepp, whom he last worked with on the home-invasion thriller Kimi, which ingeniously reinvented Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the age of Alexa and COVID.

Like Kimi, but in a completely different way, Presence makes brilliant use of spatial confinement and extracts maximal tension from a minimalist premise. As ever, Soderbergh seems to have approached this material as a technical challenge, a problem to be solved: How do you make a movie entirely from a ghost’s POV? Soderbergh has mentioned in interviews that he wore martial-arts slippers, so as to muffle his footsteps as he chased his actors around the house with his camera. I’m not usually big on behind-the-scenes documentaries, but Presence is one movie I’d make an exception for.

But while Soderbergh may be flexing his technique, Presence never feels like a mere exercise. That’s mainly due to the fine actors, especially Liang as the sensitive, troubled Chloe and Sullivan as a loving family man trying to keep the peace in a frightening situation. Their performances are haunting in every sense of the word.