Presence Is the Best Thing Steven Soderbergh’s Done in Ages

It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film. Photo: Sundance

A haunted house movie from the point of view of the ghost, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence combines the director’s ongoing formalist ambitions with stripped-down, boilerplate genre theatrics. The story may be familiar, but there’s nothing familiar about the way he’s shot it. The camera drifts through spaces, hovers around actors, races up and down stairs, and looks out windows — usually in single takes that constitute the entirety of a scene. Nobody can see this presence, whatever (or whoever) it may be, but they do occasionally sense it, which lends individual scenes a lively unpredictability.

The set-up, on the other hand, feels purposefully predictable. A family buys a new house (from a real estate agent played by Julia Fox, who gets one memorable scene), and soon, one member is sensing strange occurrences while the others remain oblivious. In this case, it’s Chloe (a marvelously haunted Callina Liang), the melancholy teenage daughter who’s still in grief over her best friend Nadia’s recent death from a drug overdose. Chloe can tell everything is not right. She can feel something inside her closet. The books she leaves open on her bed wind up neatly arranged on her desk. She starts to suspect that this ghost might actually be her friend Nadia, calling to her from the beyond. Chloe’s concerned father, Chris (Chris Sullivan), thinks she might need new medication and see a different therapist. Her distracted mom, Rebekah (Lucy Liu), thinks she just needs to get over it. Besides, Rebekah is much more invested in her strapping, swimming champion son Tyler (Eddy Maday), who also keeps his distance from Chloe. (“Two kids. You have two kids,� Chris reminds Rebekah at one point.)

Lots of films will occasionally cut away to the ghost’s or killer’s or monster’s point of view for some visual flair and added tension. Dario Argento perfected the idea in his giallo classics. Sam Raimi turned it into the ultimate lo-fi aesthetic in his Evil Dead movies. Stanley Kubrick riffed on it in The Shining. The technique is nothing new. But Soderbergh doesn’t use it as an occasional directorial indulgence, instead maintaining the ghost’s-eye perspective throughout the whole movie. The camera’s presence, the question of where it goes and why, and which characters it focuses on, thus all go from stylistic questions to narrative and thematic ones.

As usual, Peter Andrews, the credited cinematographer, is a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself, who operates his own camera, which makes the presence more than a presence; it’s the director as well. At the film’s Sundance post-premiere Q&A, the actors noted the unique feeling of having Soderbergh intimately involved in each scene with them, like another performer, hovering over them, breathing down their necks, and then sprinting upstairs “in his martial arts slippers,� with the huge camera still in his hands to capture the ghost’s speedy shifts in perspective.

So the unseen figure of the ghost becomes an expression of the filmmaker’s power over the frame, evoking the sadistic-voyeuristic nature of cinema in general and genre cinema in particular. The director is a presence, but not a participant: He compels characters to do things and makes it look like they did it of their own free will. That may sound like a lot of film theory hooey, but this idea of manipulation, of exerting unseen power over others who think they themselves have control, actually become a key plot point in the film. To say more though would be to ruin some third act revelations.

There aren’t many jump scares in Presence, and one does wonder what audiences will make of it once it’s inevitably marketed as schlock. (I can already imagine the trailers.) But it’s also not afraid to embrace horror elements, and David Koepp’s script at times seems built around audience expectations and experiences. Early on, before the family moves in, when we hear that one of the house painters refused to go in one particular room, we know exactly what he means and what is going on. Presence isn’t afraid to be narratively predictable, because it’s out there visually. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages.