Peter Andrews

is

PRESENCE

Somehow in the last several years Steven Soderbergh became mostly a streaming guy. MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE played theatrically, but other than that since 2019 it’s been HIGH FLYING BIRD and THE LAUNDROMAT on Netflix, LET THEM ALL TALK, NO SUDDEN MOVE,  KIMI, the great mini-series Full Circle and the… app (?) Mosaic on HBO MAX, plus a web series called Command Z. So it’s good to have him (briefly) back on the big screen. PRESENCE was the first of two Soderbergh joints released in theaters this year. I caught BLACK BAG but this one came and went too fast for me despite being released by Neon.

That’s okay, it’s not one of his crowdpleasers, it’s one of his Soderbergh-wants-to-try-something movies. Small, simple, kinda raw, built around a simple conceit: a ghost movie from the point of view of the ghost. If you’re thinking “Oh shit, Soderbergh did his first horror movie!” I’d ask you to hold on a second. Technically I think it qualifies, but he’s definitely not aiming for the cover of Fangoria.

It’s set entirely in one house, in long, wide, handheld shots that represent the titular presence watching the characters. Sometimes it watches from outside a window or doorway, or it backs into a closet. A few times a character seems to glimpse the presence, or is startled by it. At times it’s an unnerving feeling that something is spying, or that we are the something that’s spying. Other times you entirely forget about it because it’s not all that different from a normal camera, which therefore turns it into kind of a meta thing. Are we always a presence when watch a movie? Not a scary one, not going around sliming people, but this one isn’t either. Sometimes it seems to want to say hey, look out to the characters, just like we do.

The house starts out empty, when a realtor (Julia Fox, UNCUT GEMS) shows it to the Payne family. Rebekah (Lucy Liu, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS) is in a hurry to buy it, and her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan, THE DROP) is skeptical but goes along with it. “You know how she is,” he says. Rebekah seems mostly concerned with their oldest kid Tyler (first-timer Eddy Maday) being able to go to a school with a good swim team, and doesn’t seem to care about how unhappy their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang, BAD GENIUS) is while mourning the recent death of her best friend.

Whenever there’s a cut some time has passed. The house fills with furniture, the family gets used to their new home, the tensions between them accumulate. When Tyler brings over his new friend Ryan (West Mulholland, DARK HARVEST) Chloe self-consciously stages herself laying on her bed, feigning disinterest and/or making sure he sees her butt. Pretty soon Ryan’s spending more time with her than with Tyler, and warning her “Your brother’s got a mean streak.” If so it seems to come more from Mom than from Dad, who worries about what Tyler is turning into but maybe doesn’t know how to connect with him the way he does with Chloe. And his gentleness doesn’t necessarily help his issues with Rebekah, who hears his complaints but doesn’t seem very interested in addressing them.

Although entirely based around a cinematic, it kind of feels like a play. Maybe it’s the relative lack of cuts and closeups. It’s much more about just watching this family than traditional horror/supernatural things, though you get bits of that: floating objects, a house painter who senses something and refuses to go in a particular room, no one believing Chloe that there’s a ghost, a sort of medium they find out about who they get to come to the house and make an assessment.

I like that once the family all experience an incident together and get on the same page about this presence business they don’t really escalate in the way people usually do in horror movies. They consider leaving, Chris gets the realtor’s sister-in-law (Natalie Woolams-Torres, “Clerk,” FIRST REFORMED) to try to help, but mostly they seem to decide not to take drastic action. Complacency, denial, helplessness. Seems about right to me. I think Soderbergh also recognizes that by this point in the story we’re pretty comfortable with the presence and won’t be as scared of it as the family must be. It’s an unusual take on a ghost movie because the scares don’t come from the ghost. I was surprised to find that (that means SPOILER) the ghost is not the threat here, it’s a different thing. (No, not a werewolf.)

I felt a small disconnect between the stripped down nature of the filmmaking (which adds a certain sheen of authenticity) and some of the behavior of the characters (which seems unhinged at times). From the beginning Rebekah is uncomfortably over-the-top in her affection for Tyler and refusal to even act like she gives a shit at all about Chloe. Tyler has a side to him that’s a cruel bully. He tells the whole family what he thinks is a funny story about basically playing the “meet me in the gym and wear your tutu” prank from THE TOXIC AVENGER  on a girl at his school, except it ends in revenge porn instead of super powers. Also there are cryptic references to Rebekah having committed some sort of fraud that she might go to prison for, and it seemed like she did it to get Tyler on that swim team? And I won’t even get into the craziest behavior that happens, there is some genuine psycho shit going on here.

But I don’t know, maybe most of it isn’t far-fetched, maybe people really are horrible. I suppose they balance it out by making Chris such a caring and sensitive father. But it’s all a little goofy at times.

Oh yeah, and every time the kids sneak alcohol in this movie (which is often) they just chug a whole glass like it’s water, don’t even wince. I don’t remember BUBBLE in much detail but this might be the most awkward “ooh, that could’ve been done better” moments in a Soderbergh movie to date. At times I don’t think the seasoned pros know how to adjust their acting style to this filmmaking method, at least not while saying this dialogue. But Liang is the center of focus and the most natural. I like that Chloe is not an angel, she’s drinking mom and dad’s vodka, using edibles, sneaking boys into her room, but doesn’t seem like a “bad kid.” Tyler the anti-drug athlete is the bad kid, you heard what he did to that girl. But he’s still Chloe’s big brother. He can be gotten through to.

This was written by David Koepp, still a fascinating dude since he wrote I COME IN PEACE and later JURASSIC PARK and became known for blockbusters (THE SHADOW, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, SPIDER-MAN, WAR OF THE WORLDS, the CRYSTAL SKULL and DIAL OF DESTINY chapters of INDIANA JONES, THE MUMMY [the good one {hot take}]) but has recently done three of these little goofs with Soderbergh (KIMI, this, BLACK BAG). Soderbergh told Filmmaker Magazine he came up with the idea after believing there was a “presence” in his house and wondering about what it would be like to be her. “I wrote about 10 pages that basically just had a series of shots, over time, in the house, from what you sensed was some point of view, but which wasn’t clear yet… I sent them to David Koepp and said, ‘Does this spark anything?’ And he said, ‘I know what to do with this.’”

I mentioned at the beginning that in a sense we the viewers are the presence, but also very obviously the presence is Soderbergh, who not only directed and director-of-photographied (under his pseudonym Peter Andrews), but operated the camera. And there he is in every frame of the movie, hovering, following his characters, conveying information to us by the direction he looks, mostly not intervening in the events, trying not to cheat. This experimental mode of Soderbergh is not my favorite version of him, but it’s a crucial part of him – trying things out, developing methods, or getting things out of his system. In my capacity as the presence I encourage Soderbergh, also the presence, to toss us one of these things every once in a while in the name of art and science.

P.S. I have a theory that the elaborate dinner party scenes in BLACK BAG were done out of guilt for having seated the family The Last Supper style in this one. Why would they sit like that!?