By After the glut of amazing horror movies that came out in 2024, you’ll forgive me for being a little bit cautious of Presence. I had no immediate reason to be concerned about it, mostly thanks to the involvement of Steven Soderbergh, but because it came out in January, my guard was up. January has a tendency for being a cesspool of mediocrity, and for a movie that was less than 90 minutes, you’ll forgive me for thinking this was yet another dud that a studio dropped in January because it would DOA in any other month.
Then again, it does have an interesting premise that piqued my interest. Yes, Presence is a ghost story, but it’s from the perspective of the ghost. We’re witnessing the haunting from the first-person POV of the apparition that, in any other movie, would be a source of fear and terror. Yet Presence feels like a painfully human movie. It’s a movie that keeps you engaged right from the beginning, even if it does have a handful of flaws holding it back from being an all-time classic.
Presence
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Release Date: January 24, 2024 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
Presence begins with the spirit, who will eventually be known as the Presence, floating around a house. We know nothing about who we are inhabiting, why we are at this house, or whether the Presence is good or evil. We’re just along for the ride as they witness a family move into the house sometime later. This family isn’t exactly doing well though. Chloe (Callina Liang) is traumatized after her closest friend died of a drug overdose, and her mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), isn’t supporting her. She is clearly favoring her older jock brother, Tyler (Eddy Maday), to the point of committing some crimes so that he can have a better life, and Tyler seems content to just call her weird and crazy. Her dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan), is supporting her but is deeply dissatisfied with his marriage and wants a divorce. The Presence is watching all of this and interacts only at certain points, but usually to protect Chloe from whatever harm may come her way.
Presence is a fascinating movie because while it may have a very standard set-up and premise – a family moves into a haunted house and the ghost begins to stir things up – setting it from the perspective of the ghost was a brilliant move. As the ghost silently floats around the house, with the camera gliding along with it, we’re left to wonder just where the movie is going. If the ghost is malevolent, are they going to harm the family? If they’re not, why do they only act at certain moments? Why are they focusing on Chloe?
This omniscient POV allows us to be privy to conversations and moments that other lesser movies would probably handle poorly. There’s a scene towards the middle of the movie where one of Tyler’s friends, a guy named Ryan (West Mulholland), attempts to spike Chloe’s drink, but instead of drawing attention to that, we briefly see the Presence zoom in as if they’re an interested party observing the situation as well. Sure, it still ultimately draws your focus to what Soderbergh wants you to see, but the context within the scene is important.
Copyright: Neon
Now, you would think that without that context and the film’s hook, there wouldn’t be much else going on with Presence. Funnily enough, that’s not entirely true. Sure, this is a ghost story, but the Presence feels more like a supporting character in the family drama. We see how Rebecca subtly encourages Tyler’s bad behavior and Chris’s disappointment in both of them. We see Chloe’s withdrawal as she feels increasingly uncared for by her mother and brother. We see Chris trying to figure out how to stand up for himself and become more assertive at the risk of ruining everything he’s built up to this point. On that note, can I just say that Chris Sullivan’s performance here is probably the best thing about the movie? We see him always try to do the right thing and even though he’s not confident in himself most of the time and is admonished by Rebecca, he just feels like a genuinely nice guy who deserves better.
Every character gets some time to shine, including the Presence. We’re given one-on-one time with each of them and see how cognizant they are of the ghost. It was always so cool when characters would just look directly at the camera when they sensed the spirit yet not really connecting the dots that they were inches away from a ghost. When Chloe instantly knows that she’s being watched when she enters the house and stares down at the camera, I smirked a little. When Tyler and Rebecca, the biggest skeptics of the family, started to look around, directly made eye contact with the ghost, and then asked if they were there, I had a big grin all over my face.
Once you get over that though, Presence does start to lose some of its luster. Its climax is a bit off, swerving from one genre to another without any warning, and the potential ways the film could have been expanded go unexplored. In the middle of the movie, a medium comes into the house and begins to explain how spirits work, including the matter that they perceive time differently. That was a cool concept and made me start to think if the film was out of sequence, or other interesting ideas like the Presence possessing a person and we shift to their perspective for a scene and watch them physically interact with the world. Sadly, these ideas mostly go unexplored until the very end of the movie, which creates a weird paradox of sorts that I don’t think the movie intended to have, but that kind of comes with the territory whenever you try to introduce time travel to any film.
Copyright: Neon
I did walk away from Presence happy with what I saw, though. The hook the film has is a damn good one and it does help to elevate what would otherwise be a fairly standard family drama. I do wish that it explored its concept a wee bit more, but I think the length was perfect. It was an ephemeral movie, here only for a little bit and quickly to be forgotten. I can’t say I’ll remember Presence in a month or two, but as of now, it’s living rent-free in my mind.
