This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
With Presence, Steven Soderbergh takes an inside-out approach to the haunted house movie. The Ocean’s Eleven director brings extraordinary flair and command to this low-budget tale of a family who senses that they’re sharing their new home with something, or perhaps someone: a supernatural presence embodied by the camera. It’s the kind of movie that, in ordinary hands, would be swallowed whole by its gimmick, but Presence – in which Soderbergh, as is his custom, also serves as cinematographer and camera operator under the pseudonym Peter Andrews – veers between hilarious, moving, and downright hair-raising. Hollywood’s premier digital experimentalist has only dabbled in horror a few times before, but where the movie stands apart on his résumé is that it’s also a work of unsettling spiritual reckoning in the guise of a goofy midnight-movie romp.
Like Soderbergh’s previous collaboration with Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp – the lockdown thriller KIMI – Presence is isolated to a single location, but the story retroactively justifies this self-imposed constraint (along with other seeming physical limitations, like the avoidance of mirrors). We’re familiarized with the setting from the very start, as the camera rushes from room to room of an empty, two-story home, exploring every nook and cranny at dusk. While we’re zipped around the space the next morning, a realtor (Julia Fox) arrives to show the house to a family of four: parents Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) and teenagers Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Calliana Liang). As soon as they enter, Chloe appears to catch a brief glimpse of the camera, meeting its gaze head-on, imbuing it with weight and – fittingly – presence, before the two go their separate ways.
The family eventually moves in, though their arrival feels instantaneous: Time jumps forward, with scene transitions marked by cuts to and from black, as though blinking were a form of time travel, giving way to new scenes that play out as lengthy single takes — its style echoes that of Enter the Void director Gaspar Noé — with a meticulously modulated sound mix guiding attention to different characters and conversations. The wide lens whips around and contorts movement, catching glimpses of the family’s life and personal affairs as it accelerates around the house: Chloe has recently experienced a tragedy, Teddy thinks she just wants attention, Chris is sensitive to his daughter’s needs, and Rebekah is preoccupied with a possibly illegal work scheme.
When the invisible presence starts interacting with objects around the house, it becomes clear to Chloe (if not to the rest of the family) that she isn’t alone. Several theories are suggested, explicitly and otherwise, for who or what the presence may be. It has a sense of character, hesitance, and occasionally, aggressive motivation courtesy of Soderbergh’s swift, tightly controlled movements. Presence bypasses the concerns he’s previously expressed about the shortcomings of VR storytelling: In a movie with no reaction shots, where we’re unable to read the expressions on the protagonist’s face – a protagonist who, in fact, has no face – Soderbergh gives us that necessary information by making the camera a physical extension of himself, proving the extent to which other artists would need to go for such an experiment to work.
The film is, in some ways, an emotional extension of Soderbergh too; his mother was a parapsychologist and, like Chloe, he’s a child of a tension-filled marriage. Now in his 60s, Soderbergh is no longer a spry young upstart; like Chris expresses during the film, it’s entirely possible that growing older has made him reconsider his proximity to death and spirituality. It’s hard not to wonder if this distinctly cinematic conception of a paranormal being – in which the camera is overt and ever-present – is the only lens through which he feels comfortable imagining what comes after death.
The interplay between this ghostly presence and the human characters is initially reserved, allowing their story to play out with a wry sense of observation and dramatic irony. But the further the film gets into its 85 minutes, the more the camera begins to embody not just a sense of individuality and personality, but the impulses of the audience too – the gut-feeling, when watching a horror film, of wanting to reach out and get involved, or warn the protagonists of dangers lurking in the darkness. In this case, the presence isn’t the only danger (if it’s a danger at all), as other characters weave in and out of the family’s lives, each with their own cruel motives. Meanwhile, the movie’s first-person “monster” hides not in corners, but in plain sight, usually in Chloe’s bedroom, which Soderbergh characteristically paints only with the kind of environmental lighting that would be available in such a space, while filling in visual gaps with his signature primary washes.
Eventually, a self-professed psychic gets involved – it’s a Hollywood horror movie after all – but the more the nature of the spirit is clarified, the more questions arise about who it is, what it wants, and even how it perceives. All the while, Soderbergh unfurls a thoughtful story about Chloe dealing with loss and cruelty, and her father attempting to reckon with his own thoughts on (and distance from) his religious upbringing, in impeccably, thoughtfully performed scenes that betray a deep spiritual longing, and a desire to find answers about life and what lies beyond.
These looming questions, expressed by the characters to one another, are absorbed into the movie’s fabric and its aesthetic approach – and thus, into the titular presence as well. The result is a perfect melding of story and cinematic form, culminating in a bone-chilling crescendo.
