Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

The simple innovation Steven Soderbergh makes with Presence is relatively easy to pick up on from the film’s trailer if you are paying attention: the story is told from the point of view of the ghost. As such, the cinematography embodies the film’s most key character—and, it should be noted, from beginning to end. There’s a clever trick to this, what is arguably a gimmick but in Soderbergh’s hands is done surprisingly well. Just by the way the camera moves, from one room of the house it’s haunting to another, up close or pulling away from the house’s family of inhabitants, or even the way it frequently hides in a closet, we always get a sense of what the ghost is feeling. It’s vulnerable, it’s confused, it has a sense of purpose.

This visual styling is by far the most remarkable thing about Presence, and the strongest argument for it being worth seeing. I do have one little quibble about it, though. Most of the time, the camera glides here and there, room to room around the house, checking out the middle-aged couple and their two teenage children. When the camera goes down the stairs, however, it doesn’t quite glide seamlessly, and although it’s subtle, you can feel the cameraman stepping down the stairs. There’s no question this film was made on a modest budget (Soderbergh made it for $2 million), but this very minor glitch took me out of the movie slightly. Either that or Soderbergh wanted us to actually feel like an ethereal presence was stepping down stairs, which makes even less sense.

Soderbergh was also the cinematographer for this film, and also the editor—more effective cost-saving measures, surely—and the editing has its own bit of quirk. Presence clocks in at a lean 85 minutes, which works well for it given how many long takes there are, the camera (the ghost) followng members of this family around the house, doing mundane things. But eventually, we start to piece together parts of a family subplot, which Soderbergh never dives deep into but reveals just enough to be compelling. Rebekah (Lucy Liu), the mother who is doting on her son, the eldest, and strangley cold with her daughter, is in some kind of growing legal trouble. We see her on stressful phone calls, or deleting bunches of emails from her laptop (protip: that doesn’t hide them from the authorities), all while her husband, Chris (Chris Sullivan), barely notices. He notices enough, though, to make a clandestine call to a friend for “hypothetical” legal advice for a “friend” whose spouse may be in trouble.

Tyler (Eddy Maday), the older teenage son, is a pretty standard, straight-guy teenage prick, bragging about pranks on school mates which turn out to be far from harmless, and Rebekah easily forgiving him. Tyler has no compassion for his younger teenage sister, Chloe (Callina Liang), who is still grieving the loss of two different friends to apparent overdoses. Chloe is gradually revealed to be the most central character besides the ghost, being able to sense its presence in a way the others can’t. Presence has a fair amount in common with the 1982 horror film Poltergeist, just with the point of view inverted, and with far less histrionics. It even features a woman who gets called in to employ her powers as a medium of sorts, although that word is never used. This woman (Natalie Woolams-Torres) even manages to provide some explanation to the family, and thus some exposition for the viewers.

Chloe is convinced at first that the ghost is her best friend who died, Nadia. Little clues get revealed over time that complicate this idea. Tyler brings a friend around, Ryan (West Mulholland), who only the ghost sees—and therefore we see—is up to no good, slipping drugs into drinks. To Soderbergh’s immense credit as a very economical writer, this does not quite go in the direction we expect it to, even at multiple turns. Still, this is where we run into my biggest narrative sticking point: we are shown very early on, the ghost literally picking up and moving some of Chloe’s things from her bed to her desk. It’s arguably the corniest moment in Presence, and really its biggest mistake, as it establishes clear capability on the part of the ghost—which it does not bother to use again later when it would be most useful. When Chloe’s safety is later threatened and the ghost fears for her, all I could think was: why doesn’t it just do the same thing it did before and just scare the shit out of everybody?

I suppose it could be argued that in that moment the ghost was panicking—except it had already shaken the room once before, effectively protecting Chloe. There is a subtle implication of the ghost’s surprising identity at the very end which makes even less sense to me, unless you look back at the film beforehand and assume there is some kind of time loop going on. The woman who can sense an otherworldly presence does say at one point that time does not work the same way for this entity, so perhaps that was meant as a clue. But the more I try to go down that road, the more confused I get.

It might be useful to watch it again, except Presence is clearly most effective upon first viewing, and not thrilling enough to warrant repeat viewing. It’s a fascinatingly unique approach, to be sure, and if nothing else I’m glad to have seen it. If you don’t dig too deep in its narrative implications, it’s just a haunted house movie that uses longstanding horror tropes in new and interesting ways.

*What happens when you cross a time loop with a plot hole?*

Overall: B