POV-ltergeist
Presence, the latest Steven Soderbergh joint, has a hook that sounds radical at first blush: A haunted house poltergeist story told from a first-person perspective of the ghost, unseen by other characters. Through the ghost’s eyes, we are drawn to certain characters and moments, and we try to discern why the ghost finds those important. Whoa, another entirely first-person film, like a horror-mystery spin on Nickel Boys?
Hold on a sec: An curated lens into the lives of the characters from the eye of an invisible figure, where we use visual cues to understand the story the film is trying to tell? Isn’t that just how you’d describe a camera and direction? Indeed, once you’ve witnessed Presence’s “gimmick” for fifteen minutes, it stops feeling novel, not because “the film teaches you how to watch it” or anything that you’d normally say about formally audacious projects, but because it’s gradually revealed as not being especially different from the visual language of most other films.
What Presence most resembles is an especially slick twist on found footage films. The cast uses the same forced-naturalistic acting that you often see in the out-of-style subgenre. Like plenty of found footage films, the dramatic thrust of the story is reality growing slowly more dark and haunted, its characters grip on reality slowly slipping. Soderbergh constrains us to a single setting that becomes more sinister across the runtime.
But credit where it is due: Soderbergh is committed to the bit, and he finds plenty of little ways to make the viewing experience unique. His primary tool is the steady and free floating lens of his camera. Presence offers an astonishing, nonstop gliding sensation, ethereal and a little spooky so that we really feel like we are the ghost. (I imagine he used a handheld gimbal with a bit of touch-up in post-production.) It’s like an anti-shaky handheld cam, but with the same kinetic sensory experience associated with that style. The film unfolds entirely in multi-minute long takes, amping up the immersion and, sometimes, the tension (though it’s never scary). The fisheye-style lens pins us to the center of the frame so we’re always looking at what the ghost “wants” us to see.
The film’s story, penned by the influential thriller screenwriter David Koepp, is tight and small-scale. I’d use the word “cozy,” except it grows steadily nastier across its runtime, so that wouldn’t quite fit. The Payne family — mother Rebekah (Lucy Liu), father Chris (Chris Sullivan), older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday), and younger sister Chloe (Callina Lang) — move into a new house. Tyler is a pompous jock coddled by his mother, while Chloe is a depressive loner haunted by the overdose death of her best friend a couple months earlier. The marriage between Rebekah and Chris is on the rocks as Rebekah devotes all her attention to her shady financial career and Chris tries to keep the family at peace. Tyler makes friends with the popular Ryan (West Mulholland), who reveals a sensitive side and strikes up a secret romance with Chloe. Meanwhile, the POV ghost seems to nudge each one of these figures with little bits of prestidigitation as each subplot builds to a culminating point. Chloe in particular is sensitive to the poltergeist’s presence, and wonders what deceased person’s spirit is haunting her new house.
It’s not an especially original narrative — haunting stories that mirror fraying families are probably the most common variation of that story; e.g. Hereditary — but it comes to a pretty satisfying conclusion that ties most of the threads together. Only one of the mentioned subplots above is a red herring. And like its found footage forbears, Presence moves very quickly, barely cracking 80 minutes in runtime.
(Incidentally, given the constrained setting and use of long takes, I thought of Here more than once, especially in the film’s final shot which has a remarkably similar look and purpose given how different the movies are.)
Presence is not nearly as novel as it might seem at the outset, but it’s just fresh and well-executed enough to satisfy. The ever-prolific Soderbergh always pushes himself with new constraints and experiments, and his Presence is a nice, lightweight apertif with the 2024 awards season wrapped up.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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