Presence review – Soderbergh’s haunted camera

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s 35th feature, waiting in a vacant house for its buyers, ambitious Rebecca (Lucy Liu, pictured bottom), her favoured teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), cowed husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and troubled daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, pictured below). Presence is a ghost story from the ghost’s point of view, piecing together who and why it’s haunting as it eavesdrops on the fractured family.

Soderbergh’s elliptical editing proffers a gradual, jigsaw portrait in scenes of parental boozing, rival siblings and Rebecca’s legal laxity. Chloe is meanwhile mourning the mysterious death of a schoolfriend, who she presumes to be the spirit she senses skulking in her closet. This spectre is more supportive than her exasperated mum, who only has eyes for Tyler’s stellar future (“She can’t bring us all down with her!”), or initially ineffective dad. More welcome distraction arrives in Tyler’s new pal, dashing Ryan (West Mulholland), an apparently sensitive, romantic soul she leads to bed.

The Presence is invisible until the very end, and given character by fish-eye distortion as it takes gliding corners mirrored by the 1920s home’s curved cornices. Walls suffocatingly tighten around Chloe, as the ghost-lens warps dimensions to emotionally apt effect. Her faith in the Presence’s benign intent is meanwhile undercut by the film’s sodium haze of yellow and orange, an almost gaslight, poison fug.

“Everybody’s falling apart,” Chris desperately confesses in a rare phone-call out to a friend, then clenches in lancing pain at the stressed domestic climate. Sullivan movingly portrays a physical bear of a man who handed control to his wife as a grateful dowry, but lurches unsteadily into action to save his daughter, playing off Lu’s bracingly unvarnished portrait of an emotionally detached workaholic. Liang’s Chloe is an ordinary teenager wounded by grief and parental incomprehension, retreating to her haunted bedroom sanctum. A psychic tells the family ghosts linger from “the fear of being forgotten and ignored”. The living know how they feel.

Screenwriter David Koepp wrote to order for Soderbergh, after the director experienced strange incidents in his own LA home. The versatile, high-end pro is equally capable of crafting huge, intelligent hits (Raimi’s Spider-Man, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds) and hollow misfires (Tom Cruise in The Mummy), but his interest in Presence’s supernatural themes runs through his self-directed Richard Matheson adaptation A Stir Of Echoes (1999) and You Should Have Left (2020), twin features with Kevin Bacon.

Zack Ryan’s score swells from plaintive piano to darkly sweeping strings, suggesting a well-appointed Seventies studio horror pic, though Presence is in Soderbergh’s micro-budget, experimental vein, with his Ocean’s Eleven vibe saved for March’s starry spy flick Black Bag. Presence’s closed set-up makes it a stylised lab for in character camerawork, and a claustrophobic incubator for family distress. The director’s love of genre also injects a dose of serial killer flick to his subdued haunted house, till the puzzle slots into place, offering retrospective emotional satisfaction. If some fascination evaporates, the outre family portrait lingers.

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