Fans of Steven Soderbergh have come to appreciate the director’s ability to pivot from elaborate, star-packed confections like the Ocean’s movies to more stripped-down work like Kimi. But screenwriter David Koepp doesn’t always get the same amount of respect for doing likewise; he’s best known for scripting mega-movies like Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but he too can cut to the bone with smaller films like Stir of Echoes and, well, Kimi.
Koepp and Soderbergh collaborate again, this time on a film that features a handful of cast members, a single location, and a series of unbroken shots, and the results are chillingly captivating. Presence might technically qualify as a haunted-house movie, but there are no creaky staircases or cobwebs on display. Instead, the brilliant camera work and editing (both by Soderbergh, under his usual pseudonyms) and Koepp’s tersely insightful writing ratchet up the tension, as the audience and, eventually, the characters figure out just what’s going on in this seemingly ideal house.
We’re introduced to that house as the camera wanders in and out of its rooms, and it eventually becomes clear that what the camera sees is what the titular poltergeist perceives. A family moves in — Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan), and their children Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday) — and it’s to Koepp’s and the actors’ credit that we figure out the fissures between these characters without anyone having to stop and dump out exposition. Rebecca has some sort of high-powered finance job, and it’s clear she’s willing to bend the rules. She clearly favors the athletic Tyler, while Chris more intuitively nurtures Chloe, who’s reeling from the recent deaths of two friends.
To say more would be to remove the joy of discovery that lies around every corner of Presence; suffice it to say that Soderbergh and Koepp pack its lean and mean 85-minute running time with surprises, revelations, and close calls. This is a ghost story that takes its ghost seriously, but it’s more concerned with the dynamics of a family, and whether or not that family can survive challenges from without.
It helps that the central quartet is so strong — Sullivan and Liang, in particular, are granted the most emotional heavy lifting — with the able support of West Mulholland as Ryan, the kind of smoothly sinister teen who makes amiable chit-chat with parents before getting up to activities that would definitely not meet with their approval. Because the film is presented from the ghost’s POV, these actors have to run scenes from start to finish in a single take, with no close-ups, but the entire cast is up to the task.
Presence is a subtle film, but no less effective for its discretion in approaching the ghost-story genre. As the film’s real-estate agent (played by Julia Fox) might note, it’s got good bones.
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriter: David Koepp
Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland
Executive producers: David Koepp, Corey Bayes
Producers: Julie M. Anderson, Ken Meyer
Director of photography: Peter Andrews
Production design: April Lasky
Editing: Mary Ann Bernard
Music: Zack Ryan
Sound design: Thomas Varga, production sound mixer
Production companies: Neon
In English
85 minutes