Presence Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Ghost Story is an Un-scary Good Time #TIFF2024

The day before I saw Presence, I was lucky enough to attend a talk with Director Steven Soderbergh. During the talk, Soderbergh said two things that stuck out to me. First, that he is unburdened by the “grandiosity gene”. Secondly, that he's always looked to bring arthouse sensibilities to the multiplex.

Neither of these statements are too surprising. Since his 1989 debut, sex, lies, and videotape, Soderbergh has specialized in movies that walk the line between arty and accessible, ambitious and unassuming.

Soderbergh has directed more than 30 movies in the years since. Among them are box office hits like Ocean’s Eleven and Magic Mike, as well as decidedly less commercial fare like The Limey and Behind the Candelabra. For someone unburdened by grandiosity, it’s especially noteworthy that he was nominated for the best director Oscar twice in the same year (for Erin Brockovich & Traffic, he won for the latter).

Soderbergh announced a retirement from feature films in 2013, a career move that lasted for all of four years. His post-retirement period is noticeably less grandiose than Soderbergh’s earlier work, and has found the director releasing a series of low-budget thrillers. I remember IndieWire’s David Ehrlich lamenting that Soderbergh was making a series of “line drive singles,” and while I understand this complaint, I don’t see the problem. These movies have value beyond their apparent slightness, and a majority of them are good in their own right.

To me, what sets the 61-year-old Soderbergh apart from a lot of his contemporaries is a desire to experiment. 2006’s Bubble used amateur actors, wearing their real clothes, in scenes shot in their real houses. 2011’s Haywire cast MMA fighter Gina Carano, and choreographed brutal fight scenes that played out in near silence. Even in his “line-drive single” era, Soderbergh has continued to try out new techniques. Unsane and High Flying Bird were both shot on iPhones, and with each new film Soderbergh gives the impression of an artist who refuses to atrophy, someone determined to entertain not only audiences but himself.

Soderbergh’s newest effort is ghost story Presence. The movie premiered at Sundance, played TIFF, and will release in theaters early next year. The film’s hook is that the entire movie is shot from a ghostly POV, the mysterious Presence of the title.

The film’s story follows the Payne family, a fractured unit that moves into a new house in the hopes of escaping a recent tragedy. Daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) lost a friend to an overdose, and has retreated into herself. Mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is emotionally distant from Chloe, and has focused her attention on her socially popular and overachieving son Tyler (Eddy Maday).

That leaves dad Chris (Chris Sullivan) to pick up the pieces. Chris is deeply concerned about Chloe, and irked by Rebecca’s lack of empathy for her. This tension further drives a wedge between the couple, as Rebecca is in legal trouble related to some bad business dealings.

We see all this through the eyes of a mysterious POV, embodied by Soderbergh’s floating camera. As he often does, Soderbergh operated Prescence’s camera himself, and the movie gets some mileage out of the evident sweat of the choreography. Soderbergh’s camera bounds up stairs and navigates complex blocking as the characters move through the house. The wide-angle lens leaves no escape for the family, capturing every inch of the home’s underlit rooms.

In a post-screening Q & A, a cast member described the blocking as a “dance” and it sometimes feels that way. Presence is made up almost entirely of long takes, but the effect is immersive rather than showy. It becomes clear pretty quickly that our POV is a character, and the camerawork is personified; eavesdropping on our main characters as they clash with and deceive each other.

In fact, there’s elements of Soderbergh’s sex,lies in David Koepp’s script. Characters present a different face to each of their fellow family members. The house may be Presence’s sole setting, but within its walls Koepp finds ample opportunity to explore the character’s contradictions.

This all might sound heavy, but the movie is light on its feet. Presence has plenty of laughs, and though it’s being marketed as a horror film, it’s never scary. In fact it’s very much in line with Soderbergh’s other post retirement thrillers Unsane and Kimi.

That being said, the film is still a ghost story, and a ghost story is the perfect vehicle for Soderbergh’s cold, antiseptic style. The director’s recent digital movies have an alienating quality, and while that didn’t really serve Magic Mike’s Last Dance, it works well here.

That’s not to say everything in the film works. Actually, there is one character (you’ll know them when you see them), that doesn’t work at all. Both on the page and in performance, this character clashes with the restrained tone of the rest of the film, and their scenes threaten to completely break it. Fortunately, they are a relatively small part of the film, and their motivations are a mystery for much of the runtime. This only really becomes a problem in the climax, but unfortunately, they aren’t the only problem.

David Koepp is a talented screenwriter (he adapted Jurassic Park after all), but I had the same problem with the third act of Presence that I did with Koepp’s script for Kimi. After patiently building tension for the entire film, the climax of Presence ratchets things up way too quickly. The ending is certainly shocking, but it escalates so fast that it doesn’t have a chance to make an impact. The aforementioned problem character doesn’t help, adding an element of cartoonish evil to a movie that is otherwise pretty restrained.

Speaking of restraint, the climax has a third big problem - our ghost POV. It should be obvious to most viewers pretty early on who (or what) the Presence is, and as I said, the movie does a good job of personifying this “character.” However, the climax betrays this characterization. Our ghost is pretty active throughout the film, even in its interactions with the human characters, but during the third act it becomes strangely passive. This is not so much a “plot hole” (I couldn’t care less about that), but more an issue of character. Our Presence acts one way throughout the film, and then breaks from that to sustain the third act’s tension.

Luckily, the movie recovers in its denouement, an admirably bleak epilogue that gives Lucy Liu’s performance a moment to shine. Liu may be the biggest name on the call sheet, and she’s consistently good, but the movie belongs to Chris Sullivan.

Chris Payne is a great lead precisely because he’s a regular guy, a dad trying to connect with his troubled daughter without the tools to do so. Sullivan more than rises to the challenge of carrying the film - I could feel my TIFF audience warm to the movie whenever he was on screen. Even beyond the performance, the movie benefits from his casting. An A-lister in this role would have felt phony, and Sullivan (best known for This is Us) plays the part naturalistically. A key monologue late in the film is a clear highlight - you feel like you’re learning more about a friend.

It’s in the relationship between Chris and his daughter Chloe that the movie really shines. The family is divided because Rebecca and Tyler don’t want to engage with what’s happening - they not only don’t believe that Chloe is seeing a ghost - they don’t care. Chris is the hero because he wants to understand Chloe’s problem. He sees a loved one in crisis and wants to face it head on. In the world of Presence, that’s the bravest thing you can do.