Courtesy of Sundance Institute
PARK CITY, Utah—Steven Soderbergh never met a genre on which he didn’t want to experiment, and with Presence, he upends the conventions of the haunted house movie by telling his tale through the eyes of an unseen—and, until the end, unidentified—spirit. That gambit is the most (if hardly the only) daring thing about the prolific auteur’s latest, both because it affords inventive new avenues for creating suspense, and also because it slyly speaks to audiences’ relationship to the characters, settings, and stories they watch on the big screen. Casting us as ghostly spectators who are voyeuristically enjoying—and desperate to intervene in—the plight of a dysfunctional family, the director’s latest is a distinctly cool, dynamic Soderbergian riff on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom via The Haunting, with a dash of Paranormal Activity sprinkled around its edges.
Debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival on the 35th anniversary of the premiere of Soderbergh’s trailblazing indie sex, lies and videotape, Presence is another exquisitely compact and fluid formal exercise from an artist driven to find creative ways to breathe new life into familiar formulas. Written by blockbuster scribe David Koepp (who penned Soderbergh’s similarly concise 2022 thriller Kimi), it assumes the gaze of a specter in a spacious and unfurnished house that it roams with the free-floating fluidity of a being unburdened by gravity. In the first of numerous long, unbroken takes, Soderbergh’s camera glides, spins and soars around empty rooms, the winding central staircase, and the open modern kitchen, creating the impression that this apparition is lost and distressed, and possibly in search of something, or someone, it can’t locate. Set to melancholy piano, the sequence establishes the spatial dynamics of this milieu, but more importantly, it attunes us to our invisible proxy’s confusion and anguish.
Before long, company arrives in the form of a realtor (Julia Fox) who shows the abode to Rebekah (Lucy Liu), her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and their two children, older swimming-star son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and younger Chloe (Callina Liang), whose grief covers the clan like a shroud. They agree to buy the place, and soon the ghost’s rotating perspective takes in a home that’s fully furnished, if still less than happy. Tensions are high, thanks to a variety of escalating factors: Rebekah has gotten herself into serious (ill-defined) criminal trouble at work, thereby motivating Chris to gauge his liability (and options for self-preservation); Tyler is at perpetual odds with his morose sister, and as everyone knows (and Chris detests), he’s his mother’s clear favorite; and Chloe is mourning her friend Nadia, who recently died (along with another acquaintance) of a drug overdose.