
Photo © Neon
Presence film still
Lucy Liu in 'Presence'
In ghost stories, the living are usually afraid of the dead. Presence offers a perspective less taken: a haunted house from the ghost’s viewpoint.
The house stands empty as Presence begins, and director Steven Soderbergh gives us a tour from the ghost’s eyes as the camera pans across darkened rooms and down the stairway, watching as the real estate agent makes her pitch to the first family to view the property: Great school system, desirable neighborhood, century-old charm with all modern updates! Dad (Chris Sullivan) hesitates but Mom (Lucy Liu) insists they sign the contract. She’s a hard-charging finance professional adept at sweeping aside objections from people weaker than herself.
They have two teenage kids, and the family dynamic is archetypal. Mom favors their son, Tyler (Eddy Mayday), while Dad is devoted to daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). She encourages Tyler’s aggression—“It’s OK to go too far,” she tells him. He’s a swimming champion, a jock with a face puttied into an expression of smug superiority, while Chloe is depressed, devastated by the death of two girlfriends from drugs, especially her best friend Nadia. She’s the first to sense the presence of something in the house as the ghost gazes at her from inside her bedroom closet. Mom and Tyler belittle her concerns; Dad wants to understand. Chloe thinks the presence is Nadia’s ghost.
Nobody really believes her until the ghost trashes Tyler’s room after he gloats over friends who techno-bullied a girl at school and shared her photos online. What to do with a poltergeist? Dad knows someone who knows a woman with “second sense” whose house call complicates the picture. “You have a presence here,” she tells the still skeptical family. “It’s confused. It doesn’t know why it’s here.” Unlike the spirit in Steven Spielberg’s kinetically banal Poltergeist, Soderbergh’s “presence” usually isn’t noisy and is only occasionally disruptive. It seems sympathetic to Chloe. It wants to help—or prevent?
As with the best ghost stories, Presence isn’t only about disembodied souls. While the family is functional, the glue of Mom and Dad’s marriage is cracking and Tyler’s capacity to care about anyone but himself is long in doubt. They live in a society where communication comes in bursts and sputters. When Dad tells someone on the phone, “Everybody’s coming apart” (this is before the ghost makes itself known), the man on the line has nothing to say. Anxiety and apprehension hang over the family and the world they inhabit. The ghost is just one more source of unease.
Soderbergh emerged from the ‘80s-‘90s indie film explosion with Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and like that earlier film, Presence is voyeuristic as the unseen ghost embodied by Soderbergh’s camera watches each intimacy unfold. Over an inconsistent but interesting career, Soderbergh continually challenged himself with new topics. He’s done Kafka, Liberace, Che Guevara and Erin Brockovich; he recreated postwar Berlin and went to outer space. For his foray into the supernatural, Soderbergh worked with screenwriter David Koepp, a Hollywood insider whose credits include the best Spider-Man movie and the worst Indiana Jones. Together they made one of the most memorable ghost stories of recent years.