‘Presence’: Sundance Review

Dir: Steven Soderbergh. US. 2024. 85mins

Something is lurking in the house which has just been purchased by a dysfunctional family in Steven Soderbergh’s latest film – a juicy setup that provides the adventurous filmmaker with an opportunity to play around with form while delivering elegant shivers of dread.

Riffs on the conventions of the haunted-house thriller

Like several recent Soderbergh projects, Presence exudes a sense of experimentation — a liberating desire to try things on a low budget — and this subdued ghost story features a subjective camera in which the entire film is seen from the perspective of the invisible entity who haunts the home. The result is inviting and intriguing and, although the payoff fails to live up to the earlier reels, this modest endeavour shows the director agreeably continuing to push himself out of his comfort zone.

Screening at Sundance, Presence will obviously be a draw for Soderbergh fans, and the film’s stars Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan (who was part of the Soderbergh-directed The Knick) impress as a married couple at an impasse. In terms of the director’s smaller-scale offerings of late, this slow-burn thriller is perhaps most similar to 2018’s disorienting, impishly inventive Unsane, which grossed about $14 million worldwide. 

Rebekah (Liu) and her husband Chris (Sullivan) are moving into a new house with their teenagers Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). Happy in their new home, they are unaware of a watchful presence, who was there before they arrived. Soon, Chloe, who deals with mental-health issues and grieving the death of her best friend Nadia from an overdose, begins to sense it — even if no one else in her family believes her.

The film’s opening shot announces the story’s nifty conceit. Soderbergh, serving as the camera operator and working as his own cinematographer (under his regular pseudonym Peter Andrews), glides through the house as the unseen spectral being, silently observing the action. Each scene is a single take, cutting to black before we move on to the next. Horror movies have often incorporated the eerie POV of the killer but here the ghost becomes an enigmatic character, its motives a teasing mystery throughout.

As the audience tries to deduce if the presence is friendly or malicious, the director (working from a script by David Koepp) also involves us in the drama within the family. We only see snippets of a fuller story — essentially, only what the presence learns — but what becomes apparent is that driven workaholic Rebekah has done something unethical in her high-powered job, although she assures her concerned husband that everything will be fine. (Sullivan’s big-teddy-bear sensitivity suggests he is less sure than she is.)

Rebekah, meanwhile, adores Tyler, an arrogant champion swimmer seemingly destined for great things, but is growing exasperated with what she perceives as Chloe’s inability to cope with life. Chris feels protective of their daughter — in part because of how much his wife favours Tyler, who consistently mocks Chloe for being soft — and once Chloe starts sensing the presence, the more her experience exacerbates a friction between family members.

Depending on one’s feelings toward Soderbergh’s low-key projects, Presence can be viewed as either an enjoyable experiment or another example of his insubstantial minor doodles. Happily, it is largely the former: running 85 minutes, the film proves to be a sleek, efficient exercise, with Soderbergh riffing on the conventions of the haunted-house thriller while applying intelligence and technical mastery. Notably, the picture echoes the Paranormal Activity series in its use of an unblinking eye that quietly captures everything, leaving the audience anxious about when the frights might occur. The difference, of course, is that franchise utilised unfeeling surveillance cameras — Presence’s subjective camera adds another layer of elegant unease. What is the presence thinking? When will it start to interact with this family?

The adult leads both shine, especially Sullivan as a caring father who sees a fellow sweet soul in his daugher, but it is Chloe who eventually becomes Presence’s central figure. For reasons she cannot explain, Chloe becomes convinced that the unseen spectre is Nadia and, through some crafty, elemental effects work, the ghost begins to make its presence felt.

Some of the later revelations regarding what is going on are a bit underwhelming, but Liang expertly conveys her fragile character’s anguish that perhaps her dead friend wants to communicate from the great beyond. We watch Presence from the ghost’s perspective, but we eventually also see it through Chloe’s — a scared young woman who is unsure if the dangers are in the house or in her head.