All sorts of ghosts from the altruistic to the diabolic haunt movies, but it takes a while to get a bead on the entity drifting, and at times racing, through Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence.” However benign or malicious — whatever its life or death, possible eternal salvation or never-ending damnation — this spirit seizes your attention from the get-go because everything in this twisty, technically virtuosic, surprisingly moving chiller is shot from its point of view. From the moment the movie opens, you see what it sees: the good, the banal, the private, the scary. The kicker? Soderbergh is holding the camera — he’s the ghost in this machine.
It’s a typically well-oiled, polished, frictionless Soderbergh whatsit. Like many ghost stories, it takes place in one of the most historically troubled of all movie locations: an outwardly normal family home. There, in an attractive two-story suburban house with plenty of natural light, a wraparound front porch and a spacious backyard, the spirit wanders the handsome, blandly tasteful rooms and looks out the many windows. Although apparently confined to the house’s interior, it never feels trapped. Even so, given all the mileage that it racks up as it moves from the downstairs kitchen to the upstairs bedrooms, it is demonstratively restless.
The ghost seems pretty benign despite the unease it stirs up. It’s attentive and obviously interested in the family of four that moves in soon after “Presence” opens. If anything, the ghost seems eager for company. It routinely follows the family around, particularly the daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang, lovely), like a faithful dog — that is if that pooch were invisible and human size. (The height of the ghost’s point of view is a tell.) It’s curious yet also seems reserved. It likes to hang out in Chloe’s closet and when she takes a shower, it stays outside the bathroom and tidies up, which suggests that it’s not — or, rather, wasn’t — a creep.
The screenwriter David Koepp seeds the story with such clues, giving you just enough back story and present-day information to stir your curiosity and keep you guessing as he and Soderbergh ratchet up your anxiety. A genre savant with a raft of big credits (“Jurassic Park”), Koepp has an affinity for stories set in confined locations, especially those outwardly safe spaces that become mousetraps: He wrote David Fincher’s “Panic Room,” a thriller set almost entirely inside a brownstone, as well as Soderbergh’s thriller, “KIMI,” about an agoraphobic woman swept up in an intrigue. “Presence” is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.
The tightly constructed story unfolds chronologically in scenes of varying length that end and begin abruptly, and are separated by a few seconds of black. As time passes and periodically leaps forward — one minute, the house is empty, the next it’s inhabited — the other family members come into focus, including the hard-charging mother, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and the affable father, Chris (Chris Sullivan). They’re clearly not happy and one reason may be Rebekah’s squirmy devotion to their son, Tyler (Eddy Maday), a star high-school athlete whose arrogance can edge into cruelty. Chris, in turn, dotes on Chloe, a weepy, sensitive girl who has endured a trauma that is already haunting her and her family before they move in.
Chloe’s past, her parents’ marriage and the ghost’s restricted point of view together create palpable unease that the filmmakers build on until everyone is vibrating with tension and things have gotten weird. Although there are a few haunted-house shocks, the cumulative effect is more unsettling than scary.
To a degree, the movie is an elaborate storytelling exercise for Soderbergh, but it’s one with stakes and characters who, as real feeling creeps into the movie, you grow to care for. One of the more impressive things about Soderbergh’s work here is that he — aided by a characteristically strong cast that includes the actor West Mulholland as Tyler’s friend Ryan — makes you hope everyone makes it out OK.
That includes the ghost, which may be otherworldly but turns out to be strangely relatable. Mainstream narrative movies tether you to stories with strategies and techniques that — much like the ghost here — gives you a close, privileged angle on what’s happening. It’s rare, though, for a movie to be shot exclusively or largely through a protagonist’s point of view, and few do it successfully. (A recent outlier is RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys.”) In the 1947 film noir “Lady in the Lake,” you mostly see what the protagonist sees, including parts of his body (and his reflection), which can make it seem like he has a camera instead of a head. Soderbergh’s ghost-camera, by contrast, grows progressively and touchingly human.
Ghosts have haunted cinema since the beginning, with some early viewers comparing onscreen people to apparitions. In the years since, other ghosts, including earlier filmmakers, have haunted our screens: Hitchcock looms over much of Brian De Palma’s work like a specter. For his part, Soderbergh, one of the most restlessly inventive filmmakers working today, seems haunted by all of cinema, though there’s another uncanny, well, presence, in this movie. Here as before, he both shot and cut the movie but used two pseudonyms borrowed from his life, Peter Andrews (Soderbergh’s father) and Mary Ann Bernard (his mother).
It’s no wonder that “Presence” feels so personal — he’s brought his own ghosts to this party.
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