PRESENCE - Mark Reviews Movies

Presence, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2025

There's something in the house. Before any living person enters that building in Presence, we are with that thing—seeing from its point of view, moving through rooms and hallways as if gliding or hovering just above the ground, searching for some idea or hint as to what the reason for this viewpoint or existence could be. Soon enough, it becomes clear that the perspective of director/cinematographer Steven Soderbergh's camera is that of a ghost, haunting this house for some purpose of which it might not even be aware.

Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp's story is full of a sense of discovery, as the film tells two distinct stories at once. The first is of the family that will soon come to live in this house. Their lives are complicated in ways that mostly feel authentic, especially in the relationships among the family's members. However, they're caught in the middle of these conflicts and dramas, as well as the differences and similarities of personality that cause or heighten them.

Watching this story unfold from this particular perspective, we get to see each of them in ways they might not see themselves or each other, because we have taken on the role of a passive voyeur of sorts. We don't see everything, because the ghost has its limitations, such as being trapped inside the house and not being able to directly communicate with any living person, and this isn't, after all, simply the story of this family. Koepp's screenplay could have given us more, even within the restrictions of the rules he establishes and clearly defines as the film progresses, but in retrospect, we realize the narrative's second story is as much about what moments the ghost sees as the point of view itself.

Indeed, the secondary tale here does belong to the ghost. It's a curiosity at first, as Soderbergh's camera moves with more distinct purpose in the first act, letting us know that the perspective itself has a mind or, at least, an awareness of its surroundings. The story becomes mystery as it progresses and as at least one character seems to be aware of the ghost's existence in the house.

That character, the grieving and sensitive teenaged daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), has a theory about the ghost's identity, and as her suspicions about the otherworldly presence in the house and its motive for being a part of her life grow stronger, we almost start to imagine ourselves in the ghost's position. The mystery extends beyond what this unseen character wants and becomes the question of what we—as both the ghost and the audience—are doing in the house, why we're so invested in seeing these lives happen, and to what end, if any, our presence will have for these characters.

The rest of the family is made up of husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), his wife Rebekah (Lucy Liu), and their elder teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday). They show up one morning, after Soderbergh's almost-flying camera takes us on a silent whirlwind of a tour through the house one night, and immediately fall in love with the house. Rebekah, savvy in her business acumen, comes up with a plan to buy the place before it goes on the market, leaving Chris to question if it's financially sound, Tyler to look forward to becoming a star swimmer at the local high school, and Chloe to quietly settle in as the overlooked one of the two siblings.

As for the foundations of these relationships and a plot, Koepp is more invested in the former than the latter, but some business does emerge. Rebekah is caught up in some potentially illegal activity involving her job, but the vagueness of that reveals two important things. First, she's doing all of this for Tyler, the child she—after some drinks—freely admits is her favorite, and second, Chris knows about his wife's possible criminal actions and is torn about what to do with that knowledge.

Meanwhile, poor Chloe just stays silent in her bedroom, feels ostracized at school and home (Chris tries to stand up for her to both his wife and son, but they're too busy or self-involved to actually be there for Chloe), and mourns the death of her best friend from an apparent drug overdose. Through all of this, the ghost finds itself watching these quiet moments and listening to these private conversations (Soderbergh, who also edited the film, throws us into and tosses us out of scenes in a jarring way that eventually seems to reflect the spirit's consciousness, perhaps), but it's especially drawn to Chloe, who sometimes looks directly at it.

It may sound strange to say such a thing, within the context of a gimmicky ghost story that doesn't reveal any hard facts about the ghost's identity until the very end, but if we allow ourselves to become caught up in that central gimmick, we do start to feel some kind of empathetic connection to the unseen spirit roaming around the house and observing its occupants. After all, what are we, as the audience of a movie, if not voyeurs like this ghost?

Soderbergh is a filmmaker who likes to play with technology and, on occasion, the form, structure, or expectations of a familiar genre. Here, he gets to do both, using some simple but nimble camera rig and the narrative flip of Koepp's premise to tell a ghost story that's both about a haunting and the thing doing the haunting. The form of it, though, is so convincing and novel that we do, in a strange and surprising way, become part of this story, simply by way of watching the family, relating to them, and trying to figure out why their story should matter to us.

We are the thing inside the house, in other words. It's an ingenious device on the filmmakers' part—using the camera as a means of creating a direct connection to a character whose existence is as hazy and otherworldly as that of an audience to the characters within a movie. The form of Presence is both the means of telling a story and, in ways that evolve into tragedy by the end, a story unto itself.

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