• Sun. Feb 9th, 2025

Movie Curiosities

The online diary of an aspiring movie nerd

Stephen freaking Soderbergh. The magnificent bastard.

It really is astounding how Soderbergh is such a prominent name in filmmaking, yet he has the uncanny ability to stay under the radar. There’s no telling what he’s working on next, which pseudonyms he’s working under, or how good the final product will turn out to be. Much as I can respect and appreciate such an experimental filmmaker, there comes a point when I can only be frustrated by the lack of consistency.

Every time Soderbergh comes out with a movie, I can’t tell if we’re getting Magic Mike or Haywire. Logan Lucky or Side Effects. The Informant! or The Girlfriend Experience. Ocean’s 11 or Ocean’s 12.

So here we are with Presence, a film directed by Soderbergh with a screenplay by David Koepp. That makes two prolific filmmakers whose works are famously of inconsistent and unpredictable quality. As a reminder, Koepp was recently responsible for the screenplays to both Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. He gave us The Mummy (2017) and he gave us Ghost Town.

That said, this is not the first time Koepp and Soderbergh have collaborated: Back in 2022, they delivered the massively underappreciated Kimi. And they’ve got Black Bag coming up later this year. But this time, they made a movie that came right out of goddamn nowhere for a release amongst the onslaught of awards contenders.

I have no idea how this movie exists, or how it turned out to be so awesomely good, but here we are.

Before going any further, I should definitely issue a CONTENT WARNING. Unfortunately, I’m loathe to go into details about the third act, with regards to which horrific acts are attempted and which are actually carried out. Hopefully, it’s enough to say that the climax starts with a couple of teenagers drugged into sleep paralysis, and things keep going downhill from there.

Anyway, what we’ve got here is a relatively simple ghost story premise. The action takes place entirely within a single house that just happens to be haunted. We’ve seen a number of “haunted house” horror movies in recent years (even entire franchises, like Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and The Conjuring), but nothing like this.

To start with, the entire film is shot in POV Steadicam. None of that handheld shaky-cam stuff (except for a fleeting moment in the climax), this is all Steadicam all the time. Even better, the POV is the Presence itself. This is a ghost story told from the perspective of the actual ghost.

Even better, this ghost doesn’t seem to be openly malicious. It’s rather telling that the first time a character directly addresses the ghost, the camera retreats — not something a harmful presence would do. Even better, the first time we see the Presence directly interact with the surroundings, it acts to clean up a mess. While the living characters’ backs are turned. When’s the last time you saw a cinematic poltergeist who tried to be quietly helpful like that?

Even so, the ghost never speaks. Not even through a Ouija board or Tarot cards or anything like that. Sure, we do get an amateur spirit medium played by Natalie Woolams-Torres, but she’s not exactly able to divine much (just barely enough). Hell, it’s entirely possible that even the ghost itself doesn’t know what it is or why it’s here. We can only watch the camera movements, listen to the characters, and pay close attention to the actions of our unseen Steadicam operator to try and piece together what’s happening. The mystery makes for a highly compelling film to watch.

Then comes the ending, when we do eventually learn who the ghost is and what the goal always was. That was a masterfully executed twist ending that brilliantly upended the whole movie and put the entire story into an ingenious new perspective. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The film opens as a family moves into this haunted house. Lucy Liu plays Rebekah, an upwardly mobile businesswoman who’s getting herself into increasing legal troubles over some crooked financial maneuvers. Her son (Tyler, played by Eddy Maday) is her golden boy, and Rebekah will justify anything and everything to make sure he gets his bright future as a competitive world-class athlete. This unfortunately means that Tyler is a spoiled self-absorbed jock. He’s ruthlessly amoral, he engages in hurtful pranks, and of course he’s a stupid hormonal teenager, all of which are justified by Rebekah in the pursuit of getting whatever they want at any cost.

As for little sister Chloe (Callina Liang), she nearly died of a recent drug overdose while her two best friends died. And now she thinks there may be a ghost in the house. In other words, she’s dealing with a horrible trauma and she needs help, but her mom and her brother don’t want to do anything to deal with her. Rebekah will insist that there’s nothing to be done for Chloe except to give her time, and then in the next breath insist that she loves her daughter while ignoring her in favor of Tyler.

To sum up, we’ve got a criminal narcissist, a sociopathic lunkhead, and a teenage girl recovering from drug addiction and her own near-death experience compounded by the deaths of her two best friends. Oh, and let’s not forget that the house is haunted. With all of this going on, little wonder why Rebekah’s husband (Chris, played by Chris Sullivan) is a hair’s breadth away from leaving his family altogether.

On one level, this is very much a story about trauma and moving on, especially when it feels like nobody else is listening. On another level, it’s about unfinished business. Of course it’s a classic plot point in ghost stories that the haunting presence needs to complete something that remains unfinished in life. But when a living character and a ghost both have unfinished business, and the both of them spend the whole movie trying to figure out what it is, right up until the two objectives dovetail so ingeniously well at the climax… well, that’s something else entirely.

Another crucial recurring theme is lack of control. This manifests in so many brilliant ways. You’ve got the teenage characters at the point in their lives when they’re chafing against the restrictions set upon them by their parents and society at large. You’ve got the father who’s increasingly unable to give his family the help they need. You’ve got a mother who keeps destroying everything through her pathological need for control. And of course you’ve got the ghost, who seems to spend the whole movie feeling out what it can and cannot control.

And then of course you’ve got the love interest (Ryan, played by West Mulholland), who brings all of these themes into razor-sharp focus. The less I say about that, the better.

So, are there any nitpicks? Well, I question how easily Chloe lapses back into casual sex and drug use. Granted, it’s all tastefully handled and I know that recovery isn’t always a straight line. Even so, for her to be so careless when her ongoing all-consuming trauma is such a huge plot point… it’s a bit of a contradiction, I’m just saying.

Overall, Presence is so aggressively simple that there’s not much here to hate. It’s a slim cast, a simple premise, and a brisk 85 minutes. Yet the film offers so much novelty in its presentation, with style and heart and subtlety that elevates this into something far greater than your average prestige horror.

The movie is a bit of a slow burn, but damned if it isn’t compelling. And after that twist ending, I’d be most intrigued to see how the film holds up on a rewatch. Not that you’ll be missing much if you wait for home video (there’s certainly no shortage of great movies out right now), but this is absolutely one worth checking out.

By Curiosity Inc.

I hold a B.S. in Bioinformatics, the only one from Pacific University's Class of '09. I was the stage-hand-in-chief of my high school drama department and I'm a bass drummer for the Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers. I dabble in video games and I'm still pretty good at DDR. My primary hobby is going online for upcoming movie news. I am a movie buff, a movie nerd, whatever you want to call it. Comic books are another hobby, but I'm not talking about Superman or Spider-Man or those books that number in the triple-digits. I'm talking about Watchmen, Preacher, Sandman, etc. Self-contained, dramatic, intellectual stories that couldn't be accomplished in any other medium. I'm a proud son of Oregon, born and raised here. I've been just about everywhere in North and Central America and I love it right here.

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