Presence

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

But that’s just me. This is not in any way a scary film, or a horror / thriller flick at all, despite the involvement of the supernatural. Mostly (we think) we’re just watching a story about a family falling apart. The daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), is depressed about the recent unexpected death of her best friend Nadia, and wonders aloud if the presence she sometimes feels is the ghost of her dead friend. The son Tyler (Eddy Maday) is a raging teenage arsehole, and a swimming jock to boot, and is really fucking annoying to spend time with. That’s not to criticise the performance or the performer, because he was hired to do a job, and he does it too well. But the character is, for most of the film, an appalling entitled fuckhead.

Perhaps part of that entitlement comes from the doting mother (the great Lucy Liu!) telling her son, after a few wines, how exceptional he is and how exceptional people deserve special treatment. All her energies seem to be focussed on enabling whatever’s best for Tyler (the move to this house was specifically to the benefit of Tyler’s swimming / educational ambitions), and ignoring whatever is inconvenient (Chloe’s mental health issues, some impending investigation into her business dealings).

The fourth spoke of this five-spoked wheel is the dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan), who seems like a long-suffering chap who’s long used to deferring to a Type A personality wife, but who tries to stick up for his kids when he thinks they’re in trouble. He also seems to really hate swearing, and is worried if his wife’s business dealings are going to drag him down. But he’s also in tune enough to know that Chloe is struggling, needs help, and likely isn’t going to get it unless he presses the issue with her mother.

The presence sees all of this stuff, which means we get to see it as well too. It means that though the individual members of the family only have a partial understanding of what’s going on for each of them, we’re the ones seeing the relevant parts and piecing an overall portrait of a fragmenting family. I mean, other stuff must be going on, but the presence is not omniscient or omnipresent (that’s probably Soderbergh’s next experiment, who knows).

Chloe and her brother really don’t get along, and is easy to say that it’s because Chloe is so fragile, and because Tyler is so much of a fucking arsehole, but there’s a complexity here that we’re not going to be privy to until understanding dawns upon us at the film’s end. Nadia’s death keeps being brought up and mentioned, with some people dismissing it as just another “stupid” teenager succumbing to the perils of drug use. And oh yeah there was some other girl who this recently happened to as well, huh, I wonder if that means anything?

It helps, I guess, that the presence seems protective, most of all, of the family or of Chloe specifically. It’s almost as if the presence knows that Chloe is in some kind of danger, but doesn’t know how to protect her, or what to protect her from. Is it Nadia trying to protect Chloe from a similar fate (don’t do drugs, kids, unless they’re free, and no needles or meth ever), is it someone who lived and died in the house who doesn’t want the current occupants to die in a similarly shitty way, or is it something else?

The last part of the flick is, genuinely, depending on how you look at things, either a completely different flick, or an escalation that also serves as an explanation. All the bits and pieces were there, so I don’t think the last section comes out of nowhere, but I have read a fair few reviews that seem to be almost offended by what transpires in the film’s last section.

There is some monster out there, and it’s not the ghost.

I thought this flick, which isn’t particularly deep or “important” in the scheme of things, was pretty solid. I liked that the Asian-American mixed family wasn’t depicted in the stereotypical ways we generally get these families depicted (at least in American movies). Instead of being on the fast track for Princeton’s School of Medicine, Tyler’s a fucking jock more concerned with his social standing amongst the other jocks and getting fucked up to show he’s a hard man. Instead of playing the violin with perfect metronomic precision and studying for her SATs from birth onwards, Chloe is almost a depressed goth who would rather listen to sad girl songs in her sad girl room.

Yes, it still trades in a lot of clichés that only look slightly less cliché because of the casting, but that’s fine, or at least I magnanimously accept it as such. I think Lucy Liu is a fine actor generally but she doesn’t really get to do much other than be a disappointing parent for much of the time she’s on screen (she does have the singular killer moment towards the very end of the flick, when we bafflingly find out “who” the presence has been all along). I think in terms of acting Chris Marshall does the best work as the exasperated yet caring parent who tries to support everyone in the family without playing favourites however he’s not above calling people out when they’re being unfair.

It kinda sucks that parents have clear favourites, but what are you going to do? Become a poltergeist and wreck shit just to get your way or express your anger?

That option is not open to us mere mortals. I feel like the movie works both as an engaging experiment and as a story about a family that’s going to be destroyed through no fault of their own. We only get to chose what we do, who we will sacrifice ourselves to protect: we don’t get to dictate what malign forces outside of our families do, whether it’s the cops, or serial killers, or Scientologists. All we get to choose is our own actions.

Another triumph for Soderbergh. He must be getting sick of being such an amazing director. I mean, I imagine if I was that professionally successful at anything, maybe it would become tiresome after a couple of decades.

7 times I guess I’ll never know out of 10

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“He said, "I'm not going in *that* room." That's what he said.” – get out, maybe? - Presence