Soderbergh’s Presence (2024) - keenly felt

Not terrifying 

Falling somewhere between his more experimental mode and pop genre approach, Presence feels very much like Soderbergh’s take on “elevated horror”. It shares much of the genre’s watermarks, mostly where themes tend to overwhelm plot or mitigate the frights that are the parvenue of horror. To be clear, I don’t necessarily find this a fault of the genre or various examples of it.

Also, I’m a tough sell. The times I’ve actually been taken by a horror film are very few; maybe someday, I’ll cover them. I also can’t take critics seriously who complain that a movie isn’t scary, scary enough, or for that matter, scary. I can’t. It’s make-believe, and in order for to work, there has to be suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the film’s narrative as reality. 

A significant amount of horror and suspense relies on structure. Plot can even fall by the wayside if the central conceits and characters are strong enough. When all three come together, then watch out. 

The Exorcist works because all these elements are strongly in place and it is one of those few films that gets under my skin repeatedly. It is one of the few that linger for days after. The Babadook, which many found genuinely unsettling didn’t have any such effect on me. It was thoughtful, and a genuinely - for me - beautifully rendered look at parenthood, existential uncertainty and a kind of damaged love between parent and child that needed to be healed. But scary? Nope. 

Other films like It Follows are again, masterful, but I’m a jaded prick. I really am. I find films like The Road or Children of Men far more horrific than many in the so-called horror genre because these films are more “real”, if equally laden with textual riches. 

This is all a very long, drawn-out way of saying that when I review a horror movie, you’re going to be disappointed when I say I don’t find it frightening, because it’s rare that I find anything frightening in a performance medium. Last note and we’ll get to Soderbergh’s latest.

There are films that are and remain unsettling. Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Us, for instance. Both of these films get to me, not just for the remarkable depth of commentary on social issues (duh), but because he get it. There are genuinely unnerving sequences of existential dread-inducing moments. More recently, Longlegs fit the bill. I’m not a complete heathen.

With Soderbergh’s film, though, I came to it with my usual Soderbergh expectations. It would likely be experimental to some degree, it would be expertly executed, it might even be innovative to some degree, but mostly, I was betting that he’d find an emotional center to a weary field. 

All of this tracks with varying degrees of success. We see everything from the point of view of the Presence. Soderbergh uses a fish-eye lens and some of the smoothest camera work around as we float from room to room, overhearing snippets of conversations or entire discussions that seem disparate but show a family more or less evenly split in terms of values and how they cope with their different challenges.

The cast turns in remarkably naturalistic performances, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Soderbergh leaves the stylization to the Presence/subjective camera. There are elements of twinning and pairing off between two sets of ensemble. On the one hand, there’s Lucy Liu as Rebekah, a high-powered executive who has taken some kind of perhaps illegal approach to finagling getting her son into an elite school. Both she and Tyler (Eddy Maday) are career-focused, ambitious, and of the four principles, the least convincing as people. For sure, there are people like this in the world, and for sure, you rather need them to play off the more inward/intuitive pair of Chris Sullivan as dad Chris, and Callina Liang as daughter Chloe. 

The set-up from the latter pair’s side is that Chloe has lost her best friend to a drug overdose and the bottom of her life has fallen out. It’s been over a year, but while her father is sympathetic, her brother is very much not and her mother favors her son so much, you don’t get the feeling there’s much feeling there for her daughter. In fact, at one point, Rebekah’s hug and “have a nice day” to her daughter is so perfunctory, it’s reads almost as an afterthought. It’s not mean-spirited, but it’s obvious where loyalties lie. Oh, and Chloe can sense the Presence whom she misidentifies as her deceased friend. She’s aware that it means no harm and seems concerned for everyone. A benign presence, then.

The Presence, as all good ghosts, can move things. It replaces Chloe’s books and stacks them neatly on her desk, when an intense argument happens, it detaches the clothes and shelving from Chloe’s closet. Later, when it makes itself known in another outburst, the family finds itself outside on the deck with more unraveling. Tyler is non-plussed and seems over it all, and Chloe is exasperated that he doesn’t find this fascinating. Rebekah wants the problem solved, and Chris, who’s been trying to wrap his mind around both Rebekah’s problematic dealings and the things Chloe has told him, knows a guy whose wife has second sight.

She comes the next day, confirms that Chloe is gifted, that there is a presence in the house, but that it isn’t sure who it itself is, that it feels the pain in the family and particularly Chloe. It does want to help but doesn’t know what to do. Because time works differently for it, it’s uncertainty is a kind of temporal dislocation, as well. In other words, the Presence is a mirror of the anxieties and tensions pulling at the Paynes. 

There is one more plot point, one more character integral to the film in the form of Ryan (West Mulholland), the popular kid at Tyler’s school who has befriended Tyler and falls for Chloe, unbeknownst to Ryan. To say much more would be major spoiler territory and I don’t want to kill this film for anyone, particularly if they are a Soderbergh fan. It’s a short film and it begs the question if the limited amount of time was a self-imposed feature by either Soderbergh or David Koepp, back working together after Kimi. Indeed, there’s a formal restraint here that contains the picture and doesn’t exactly ratchet up suspense or awe. 

In some ways, Presence seems like a distance response to Kubrick’s The Shining. Along with a single location, a family in dissolution, a ghost, a child who can sense it, and another element I’m not mentioning, Presence is a stylistic accomplishment with echoes of the earlier film; the smoothness of the camerawork is reminiscent of the steadicam work in Kubrick’s opus, but the dramatic tension is flipped on its head because of Chloe’s sympathy toward the Presence and vice versa. 

The formalism in The Shining amplified the sense of isolation, both of the family’s physical remoteness, as well as Jack from Wendy and Danny. The Overlook Hotel, as vast and endless as it was, was oppressive and ultimately a vehicle of destruction. In Presence, the polarity is reversed, though it’s fascinating how through the use of fluid camera motion, the sense of space is more open. In both films, the spatial dynamics are as integral in defining the architectural space as a character as the objects and people that inhabit them.

The other difference is that in terms of genre, Kubrick produces a sense of dread, then fear, of Jack and for Wendy and Danny. All the while knowing that while Danny is in touch with the hotel’s malevolent nature, Wendy is not and for her, with her child in harm’s way, the stakes escalate moment by moment. In Presence, there are no such stakes; lack of communication, power dynamics in the family unit, split alliances, all feel too small for what’s happening. But that, too, is by design.

Soderbergh is more interested in the family and the Presence in relation to Chloe. This isn’t a horror movie in many ways, but a meditation on familial ties and the forces that bind and unbind them. It os another formalistic experiment for both Soderbergh and Koepp, and I found it of a piece with Kimi where the pieces fall into place bit by bit, but you’re mainly to drawn to the confusion that beleaguers the character and informs the relationships and actions on the screen.

It is, for me anyway, another satisfying Soderbergh experience. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it does point how certain formulaic aspects can be altered and used for a different kind of affect, and I do mean “affect.” Contagion was far more frightening than Presence, but then, I don’t think Soderbergh or Koepp have set out to make a frightening film. 

There is at heart, in many ghost films, a kind of sadness, and that’s where this film points to it, but doesn’t exploit the sense of tragedy or entrapment in a physical (or even metaphysical) space. The Presence is simply there. I’d love to go on about this more, but to do so would mean drilling down into areas of the plot best left unspoiled.