Wrapped Attention
Presence
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 2024
Extension 765
UK cinema release print.
Warning: Very light suggestion of a spoiler.
I don’t know. You wait ages for a new Steven Soderbergh movie to come out and then two come along at once.
Now I find Soderbergh quite hit and miss as a director but he has done some excellent movies in the past. I was surprised, however, when I sat down in the cinema the other week, to find two back to back trailers advertising two new films directed by Soderbergh and also both written by David Koepp. Both looked, at the very least, pretty interesting. The second of the two, Black Bag, will presumably be upon me before I even know it but the first of these, Presence, was the one I was most looking forward to because it’s marketed, inevitably because of the vibe the camerawork gives off, as a horror movie.
Now Presence is not, technically, a horror movie but it does have a strong supernatural content and although there is a certain lurking fear of the unknown as part and parcel of every shot of the picture, it’s ultimately more of a drama which happens to feature a ghost. And that ghost is… well it’s certainly someone but, for the majority of the film where the identity of said spirit is withheld, that ghost is you. The audience watching the movie. Because the Presence of the title is a point of view, roving camera representing the audience looking through the eyes of the ghost. And that’s every shot of the movie and those shots are composed of mostly long takes with lots of smooth, languorous, fluid camera movement.
The story of the film is about a family that moves into a house which, yeah, definitely has a spirit in it... lurking and waiting for this family (as it turns out, specifically this family) to buy the property and move in. The family consists of a mother, played by Lucy Liu, who has made a big mistake at work which could possibly get her in trouble. Then there’s the husband, played by Chris Sullivan, who is possibly involved with some kind of shady dealings which is hinted at (much to his regret). Then we have the two kids… the athletic, pain in the neck brother Tyler, played by Eddy Maday and his sister Chloe, played by Callina Liang, who has just lost her two friends from an unusual double drug overdose. And it’s the sister Chloe who is the main subject of the ghost’s attention, via the camera eye of the audience. Is the ghost in love with her? Is it the ghost of her dead best friend watching over her? Well, all I will say on that count is, the secret behind the death of the friend is actually very relevant to the drift of the story… just not in the way you may at first think.
And then Tyler’s new college friend, played by West Mulholland, comes into the picture and he also seems to have an interest in Chloe (much to the ghost’s outrage, expressed in one scene where he and Chloe are trying to have sex). And then there’s the character of a psychic, who eventually enters the picture once the family realise that there’s definitely something going on in the house… and she’s both the blessing and the curse of the film.
A blessing because she’s obviously there to lay a few ground rules about the nature of the ghost to the audience, so that there is a sense of understanding of what’s going on later… but also a curse because, once I’d gotten an angle on the… let’s call them temporal traits of the spirit in question… I was much less surprised by the ending. I figured the ghost could only be one person and, while I got the identity of the person slightly wrong… and only because I was expecting the writer to go the whole hog and pull off a complete ‘bootstrap paradox’ at the conclusion... I was pretty close in all the bits which are important to that ending. However, because the slight mistake I made on identity, I still got a kick out of the very last shot of the movie, where the ghost is revealed in a silver nitrate mirror, as made by the Victorians (and since it’s Soderbergh and Koepp, the other cinematic connotations of silver nitrate must also surely have been in the minds of the writer and director).
And the film is absolutely brilliant, as far as I’m concerned. My expectations were somewhat lowered by a review I’d heard and also some bad word of mouth on the film but, for me I think this is an early contender for one of the best movies of the year, to be honest. The cinematography is hypnotic and the real tension of the movie comes from various characters looking into the camera as they sense the ‘presence’ nearby. It’s nicely scored too and, due to the obvious format choices, certainly has a nice fly-on-the-wall, immersive feel to it. The actors were all great too, which helps a lot because the way they were written and performed (though I suspect there was maybe some improvisation going on too) means you really care about what happens to them (and something does happen to at least one of them, for sure).
So that’s me done with Presence and it’s a solid recommendation from me on this one. Bring on the Blu Ray.