With Presence, Steven Soderbergh Resurrects the Ghost Story: Review

The Pitch: On a quiet street in a quiet little city, an empty hundred-year-old house awaits a new family. Well, it’s not totally empty — there’s a presence in those rooms, wandering unseen as new residents come to occupy these bedrooms. This family isn’t a perfect one: Matriarch Rebekah (Lucy Liu) has a tendency to steamroll her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), while their elder son Tyler (Eddy Maday) has a bit of a bullying streak, and younger daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent loss of a friend. And they’re all at a loss as to how to handle the force in their home that’s becoming more and more… present.

A Master at Work: From the beginning of his career, Steven Soderbergh has proven to be one of our most nimble and fascinating directors, someone unafraid of taking risks — someone who, in fact, seems to thrive on them. Like many creative types, he’s got his sweet spots, but that hasn’t stopped him from building an indie drama around the performance of an untested porn star, or directing every episode of a Cinemax period drama, or launching a sci-fi web series starring Michael Cera on his personal website.

By those standards, Soderbergh turning his focus to a small-scale ghost story like Presence isn’t all that big a leap; as a director, he tends to thrive while operating in microcosms like the one provided by David Koepp’s tight script. Yet like so much of Soderbergh’s work, Presence proves so exciting because it’s a perfect example of concept and execution coming together for 90 minutes of cinema that delivers quite a punch. To watch Presence is to surrender control to a great storyteller — to put yourself in his hands, knowing he knows exactly where he’s going to take you.

Ghostly Echoes: Soderbergh tends to be the director of photography on his own projects these days (under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews) and rarely has that been more important than with Presence, as the POV is rooted entirely in the perspective of the unnamed spirit haunting this house. This means a lot of swirling shots and fish-eye lenses, as the spirit explores the space it’s trapped in, the limbo which defines its existence. The camera isn’t just a character in the story — it’s the protagonist.

Serving as a sharp contrast to the postmodern cinematography is the score by Zack Ryan, a lush old-fashioned soundtrack that feels deeply inspired by the empathic orchestral tracks of Bernard Hermann. There’s not a lot of it, but the cues that do come in are perfectly timed. Meanwhile, the sound design team deserves a lot of credit for creating a whole sonic dimension to the house, one that really captures what it means to live in a place, and know the way the footsteps in one room can echo in another. The result is a mise en scène that aches with life — all too fitting, given the emphasis on death.

The Haunted: Presence features only a small cast, with the core family’s chemistry essential to selling the film as a whole; fortunately, Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan prove more than capable of suggesting years of history within their interactions. As parents, they’re flawed but trying their best, finding ways to engage with their adolescent offspring that feel authentic and relatable.

Presence (Neon)

Eddy Maday isn’t given much to play when it comes to Tyler, a character bogged down to some degree by the performative awfulness that comes with trying to be cool and popular — though as his father tells him, a good man is lurking inside him somewhere. Most heartbreaking is Callina Liang, whose emotional turmoil goes beyond typical teenage woes, and serves as the film’s aching heart, the one most attuned to the strange happenings going on in this house.

The Verdict: The scope of Presence remains small and intimate throughout, in a way that really makes you appreciate Soderbergh’s craft, especially his attention to detail. For a film this focused, there are more red herrings than you might expect, plot threads which don’t go in expected ways — a looming scandal ends up being more a test of a marriage, while potential danger lurks in plain sight.

There are eerie moments throughout the film, though nothing that tips over into full-scale terror. Until, that is, it all comes together in the end, for a real gutpunch of a conclusion that reminds us of the inescapable truth about all ghost stories: They’re all ultimately tragedies, in one way or another. They’re always about loss. And they’re always trying to remind us to make the most of our time on Earth while we’re here… in one form or another.

Where to Watch: Presence begins haunting theaters on Friday, January 24th.

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