With 35 directing credits under his belt, Steven Soderbergh has developed a reputation as Hollywood’s jack-of-all-trades. Presence’s $2-million-dollar budget and first-person cinematography feel a world away from the iconic Ocean’s and Magic Mike franchises, but the spectral paranoia of Contagion dwells in this film’s narrative of a dysfunctional family struggling to agree on (or accept) whether or not they are being haunted.
The narrative is tried and true; a family moves into a house which they assume to not be haunted, when it is, in fact, haunted. You’ve seen it a million times, but rarely from the poltergeist’s point of view. This is where Steven Soderbergh and a Sony A9 come in.
Soderbergh (working under ‘Peter Andrews’ as cinematographer) shoots the entire film from the perspective of the harmless ‘Presence’. We don’t know what it wants, but some suspect it might be an old friend. The camera, limited to eye level and occasionally peered into by spooked characters, weaves through rooms, navigating the fraught marriage between Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan). The camera work is deft and highly intuitive, if not a little unadventurous in its angles.
The matriarch Rebecca likes to cut corners. We hear a phone call about suspicious tax moves and see her mass-deleting emails between gulps of red wine. She believes that only time can solve problems, waving her hand (literally) at the depression which racks her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who has just lost a friend. Mercifully, Chris makes up for Rebecca’s coldness. The sensitivity Sullivan brings to the role is the film’s highlight, and he connects beautifully with his daughter over what others dismiss as superstition.
Chloe’s athlete brother Tyler, played by Eddy Maday, is comically unforgiving. Instead of enhancing the tension between struggling siblings, Tyler’s rebukes of Chloe’s behaviour reads more as bad writing, an unsubtle way of showing that our victimised protagonist just can’t catch a break. “Make her piss in a cup… I’m telling you she’s fucked in the head, and it’s not the dead friend shit,” Tyler says to his father in one of his more jarring lines. It lacks nuance, it’s degrading, and it renders the older brother a caricature. Maybe if we spent more time with Tyler we would feel some sympathy for the jock act he assumes, but at 85 minutes, the film doesn’t allow much time for that.
Despite this, Soderbergh and writer David Koepp shine together in a few scenes. In a grippingly awkward moment, Rebecca drapes herself over Tyler, a glass of whiskey beside her, fawning that she feels closer to him than anyone in the world. “What about Chloe?”, the uncomfortable Tyler asks. It’s a fantastic snapshot of Rebecca’s values — swim trophies and kids that don’t feel too much.
Much like the film’s postering, which includes a family photo in inverted colours and another with the house flipped upside down, the movie’s dialogue is a little unimaginative. I won’t get into specifics, but the audience stifled laughter at many of West Mulholland’s lines as Ryan, Tyler’s edgy best friend. An attempted evocation of the dark tendencies the internet can breed (the film momentarily lunges at the dangers of teenage social media use), Ryan will be difficult for anyone under the age of 25 to take seriously, as his lines sound like they belong in one of those sad Bart Simpson XXXTentacion edits from 2018. Despite this, the codependent relationship he develops with Chloe oscillates between chillingly real and comically clunky, as Ryan (or Mulholland) can’t help acting far too cool for school. Mulholland’s is one of the hammier performances I have seen in a while, which is saying something considering my religious attendance of the Randwick Ritz’s David Lynch retrospective this past week.
Lynch, may he rest in peace, was a master of evoking the seedy underbelly of American suburbia. Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks (which bears some real narrative similarities with Presence) are tense and confounding, using uncanny dialogue, supernatural themes, and experimental cinematography to reveal the dark secrets which fester in peoples’ attics. Despite Soderbergh’s point-of-view camera shakes, edited screen vibrations, and occasionally off-key dialogue à la Lynch, Presence lacks the technical and narrative oomph to strike fear — or really anything — into the heart of the viewer.
Presence was released on 6th February 2025.
