Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
If one were to compare directors solely by virtue of the type of films they make, the best point of reference for someone like Steven Soderbergh would likely be either a kind of hyper-productive avant-garde artist or a titan like George Lucas or James Cameron more than one of his studio-adjacent contemporaries. The sheer breadth of his work and its relative affordability keeps the Cameron-and-Lucas types at bay, but his commitment to innovation, through whatever means he has available to him, and his ability to find funding and distribution for his projects with relative ease ensures that he’s not relegated to museum showings. What unites them all is a uncompromising passion for whatever they’re working on, sometimes with catastrophic financial and critical consequences, but they succeed more often than not. I don’t think they’ll open up, say, a Bubble world at Disneyland, nor do I think that something like the Magic Mike trilogy would ever show at MOMA, but regardless, the point stands: Good or bad, he’s always doing something interesting. Occasionally, these things don’t necessarily work out for the best – The Good German, for example – but his output is a fascinating collection of pet styles and aesthetic interests, and you sometimes wind up with something that takes the best of all worlds and puts them together in an absolutely compelling package. Presence, his latest, is one of those films.
Soderbergh has crafted one hell of a hook here: Presence is entirely filmed from the point-of-view of a poltergeist/spirit/whatever you want to call it that haunts a suburban family home as a new set of occupants move into it. The family’s been through some shocks, as the mother (Lucy Liu) is confronting some potential legal trouble, and the father (Chris Sullivan) wonders if he should get a divorce to potentially shield their children from the legal consequences. The son (Eddy Maday) is a star member of his high school’s swim team and is his mother’s golden child – she drunkenly lavishes him with praise, saying that his birth was the best thing to ever happen to her – while their similarly-aged daughter (Callina Liang) is quietly suffering. One of her friends passed away suddenly in the previous year, and the move is part of the mother’s efforts to get her to move on. Dad knows that’s a bit of a fool’s errand, but he follows the plan while supplying all the care he can give his daughter. But it’s not enough – she’s a stoic and a typical teenager, and she falls in love with one of her brother’s swim teammates (West Mulholland), who seems comforting and caring but has a bit of a darkened edge. You know, regular old bad-boy material – who can resist that?
At first, the specter refuses to make its presence known: it just observes what’s happening in the family home, though it is occasionally glimpsed through the spirit world by the girl, who finds it decently creepy. Soderbergh doesn’t clarify early on what intentions this ghost might have, and its identity is well-preserved until the film’s final minutes. Regardless, it does have a deep interest in her and her suffering, slotting well within what has been established about poltergeists over the years (this is why I’m using this term somewhat interchangeably because in those ghost stories, real or not, the spirits typically glom on to young women in the midst of a great change). It does treat her tenderly, straightening up her room, levitating her textbooks from the bed to the desk, and is also somewhat shy and somewhat concerned with her privacy — when she has sex with her boyfriend, it hides in the closet, cutting out of consciousness. No one believes her at first, though they soon will when after the brother throws a particularly shitty tantrum towards his suffering sister, it responds by fucking wrecking his room. The family hires a medium who immediately senses certain disturbing things about the identity of the ghost and who does her best to help the family, though she may be somewhat of a con artist (at least it seems). But the reasons for this haunting will be soon revealed, and its intentions — and who they were in human form — may not be what you’d expect.
If filmed traditionally, Presence would still be a really accomplished little thriller — horror film doesn’t feel like the right phrase here, given the directions that the plot takes, as well as its lack of full in-your-face scares — as it has a well-rendered story and solid characters, performed by a quartet of actors each turning in fantastic work. Sullivan and Liang are the standouts, but all of the key actors can embrace the contradictions within each of them and make them feel compellingly honest. But Soderbergh’s style is enthralling in ways that are hard to quantify. I’d heard it described as a “movie entirely filmed in Raimi-cam” (thanks, Batz), but it’s a bit different in practice, owing more to classical masters of suspense like Hitchcock (with Rope seemingly being a major influence) or De Palma than a lot of other Steadicam-using genre filmmakers. And that’s not a diss to masters like Raimi or Carpenter — indeed, the latter feels very present here, in just how seamlessly the camera glides from room to room — it’s just a different aesthetic ethos. Yet it also feels similar in practice to a lower-scale version of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void with a tad more formal restraint (financiers only have the cash for one depiction of the psychedelic cycles of death every quarter-century, after all). It’s intensely well-planned, with hyper-precise blocking and camera movement, and it’s astonishing just how gentle it all feels, at least up until it isn’t playing nice anymore.
A lot of what I have to say about Presence is tied up in its final minutes, in which we’re given a revelation that turns the entire film on its head and excuses a lot of what I think others have called “indulgence” — you know, all of those little undervalued moments in studio cinema that don’t slot perfectly into a three-or-five-act structure. We get a lot of that here, patient and quiet shots of people just going about their days or having a conversation in the confines of their homes, made uncomfortably close by just how personal it is. There’s an argument to be made that the film is too neatly designed, but I genuinely appreciated how strongly it comes together in an understated yet emotionally affecting way. Once it becomes clear that the ghost is its own character, trying to glean its motivations — and being surprised once they’re revealed — is part of the suspenseful fun of it all.
That’s what I walked out of Presence being the most unexpectedly pleased with: It is a lovely thing to watch Soderbergh follow one of these tangents he goes on and seeing it result in a broadly crowd-pleasing and effective little thriller. It isn’t that rare that these interests overlap but, over the last few years, it has been a bit more of a struggle for me to properly vibe with what he’s laying down on those massive memory cards, even in something that feels tailor-made to my interests, like Magic Mike’s Last Dance. I didn’t really need a reminder or additional proof that Soderbergh is one of our most interesting directors, but Presence is a nice rejoinder to the idea that he’s becoming a fully-insular filmmaker, one losing the ability to connect with a broad audience. He’s still got it, and goddamn is he good.