Ssometimes what’s absent from a film defines it as much as what’s present. Negative space is cinema’s great underutilized resource. It requires that you trust your audience to follow, to fill in every intentional gap, to grasp the meaning of every invisible whisper.
Steven Soderbergh was the hot-headed kid on the block when he directed Sex, lies and video (1989), in which a then-new technology opens the world to a married couple on the skids. In the years since, he has made films large and small in large numbers, and while some have failed to achieve their goal, many filmmakers could die happy if they had directed even ‘only one film as great as Elmore Leonard’s 1998 adaptation. Out of sight, or a thriller as bitterly brilliant as Limey, released the following year. Soderbergh is willing to try anything, including shooting a movie on an iPhone, and if it doesn’t work, he’ll move on without missing a beat; his failures are often more interesting than the successes of other filmmakers. But every once in a while, he achieves unassailable perfection, seemingly without even trying. Her Presence is a modest picture: it’s set in a sprawling (and, from a real estate-porn point of view, extremely covetable) antique suburban home. But it’s so compact, smart and stylish that it seems quietly important. Without handing over everything, it gives you everything you need.
The film opens with a real estate agent (Julia Fox) scrambling to show a family a house: it’s a beautifully maintained and tastefully appointed Victorian with William Morris-style wallpaper and untouched natural woodwork, as well as a huge modern kitchen that no one will want. never cook – that is the modern way. The matriarch, Lucy Liu’s Rebekah, decisively announces that she will accept it. Her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) is more reluctant: There’s a fire station down the street, doesn’t that mean a lot of sirens? But it’s a nice house and, more importantly, it’s in a good school district. This is important to Rebekah, who wants to ensure that her son, star athlete and star student, Tyler (Eddy Maday), can continue to thrive. She and Chris also have a daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), who Rebekah treats as an afterthought. Chloe has recently suffered a profound trauma, the death of her closest friend, and there is also something a little ghostly and absent about her too: like a sleepwalker in a Val Lewton film, she approaches ‘an old mercury mirror above the fireplace as if it were. a portal to another world. Her father is worried about her; Rebekah just thinks she needs to get out of this and says so.
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The family moves in. Chloé settles into her room, repainted just for her, even if, before the move, one of the hired painters refuses to even enter, he feels that there is something “weird”. Chloe also notices something, but to her, the one who seems to be watching her seems more like a friend than a threat. She wonders if it could be the spirit of her lost friend, Nadia. Meanwhile, bland jock Tyler also moves in down the hall, but with much less drama. He invites a new friend, a smiling kid from school, Ryan (West Mulholland). Ryan and Tyler stop by Chloe’s room to say hello as she flops down on the bed studying. Later, Ryan nods to Tyler with a slight sniff, the universal unspoken male language for “Your sister is hot.”
The rest of Presence is about the fragile and delicate nature of family dynamics, the tangled nuances of consent, the terrible ways in which one human being can manipulate another. As we watch this domestic drama unfold, so does this invisible, otherworldly presence. The entire film is shot in first person: the story is told from the point of view of the restless spirit who seems to be awaiting the arrival of this family. A closet shelf falls with a deafening crash, interrupting the ensuing action a bit. Later, a more cataclysmic earthquake leaves a room in disarray: everyone is shaken except Chloe, who seems to have one foot in a world that the others don’t understand. His father, Chris, is friendly. Rebekah is so obsessed with Tyler that her daughter simply takes second place. In a half-funny, half-disturbing scene, Rebekah sits at the family’s large kitchen counter, a half-filled glass of whiskey in front of her, and regales Tyler with a sort of proto-Shakespearean anthem: “All that I did, I did. “I made it for you,” she told him flatteringly. It turns out she’s involved in something fishy at her high-profile job, and while we never find out exactly what it is, we see that it makes Chris worried and unhappy.
This family is in crisis but doesn’t want to admit it. Yet the most vital relationship in Presence is it between Chloe and her ghost. We see how, as she tries to get back to real life, this ghost is all she has. There’s a joke with Ryan, who talks well about taking care of her: “I don’t feel so alone when I talk to you,” he tells her, a confession that’s actually a flashing red flag. The vanity of Presence– the idea of the camera as an all-seeing ghost – means that the watchful spirit of the house is truly look at to the characters, discerning their thoughts and feelings in a way they can’t always do for each other. In this sense, the camerawork is not a gimmick: it reinforces the intimacy between us and the characters and actors. The camera sweeps through the house with its ghostly current, watching Chris as he makes an anxious phone call to a friend, or Tyler as he dozes off in the living room, after downing a strong drink. (There is a lot of alcohol in Presence.) This pierces the veil of Chloe’s suffering: she tries to be okay, but there is a veil of emptiness around her, and she can’t get out of it. This ghost even, ultimately, has empathy for Rebekah: Soderbergh’s camera captures it as an embrace.
Let’s call Presence a ghost story more than a horror film: although it features a scene of utter, slow-burn terror, there are no wacky psychopaths in excessive makeup, no creepy sentient dolls, no of sadistic trapping sequences. Presence is something else, a film that scares but also has poetry at its heart. The screenplay is by screenwriter David Koepp, who has previously worked with Soderbergh. (He’s also a wonderful filmmaker in his own right, with pictures like the beautifully offbeat romantic comedy Ghost town and the chic thriller of the bicycle messenger Bounty Rush among his credits.) You can feel the simpatico vibe between Soderbergh and Koepp. There’s nothing forced Presence. There’s no rushed conclusion at the end to explain the unexplainable, nor any aggressive effort to make the audience feel like they’ve had a good time. Instead, Presence sends you into a cloud of sweet melancholy. We feel a little sad for this family – and also sad that there aren’t more horror films like this, made with more thought and care than money, films that respect our feelings and our intelligence. Presence follows you home, long after the camera has stopped rolling.
