Steven Soderbergh has made a ghost story with a screenplay from Hollywood veteran David Koepp. It sticks to a single location – the haunted household house – and the primary character is the hand-held digicam’s ghostly point-of-view. It’s the mute witness to all the things that occurs, roaming wordlessly round the home: up and down the steps, out and in of the bedrooms, and evidently forbidden to exit again into the backyard or out entrance on to the porch. We see what it sees.
Presence is conceived on elegant and economically spare strains, dialogue scenes are introduced blankly, shot largely from a distance (the ghost indifferent and hanging again) and interspersed with blackouts; it’s well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. However for me it’s marred by an early, unsubtle second of overt supernatural creepiness, which indicators a retreat from ingenuity and restraint. Maybe it was a industrial concession to the concept that, for all of the cool underplaying and periodic, uncanny sudden-chill moments through which a personality will look warily into the lens, the viewers must be reassured that it is a scary horror film; it must be proven what occurs when an invisible ghost picks one thing up and carries it to the opposite aspect of the room. Surging strings on the soundtrack additional underline the scariness.
The ghost might be learn as a metaphorical expression of the household’s personal horrible unhappiness and dysfunction. At first the home is empty as all of them transfer in: Chris (Chris Sullivan) and Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and their teenage kids, swim workforce champ Tyler (Eddy Maday) and youthful, delicate Chloe (Callina Liang). Assertive Rebecca loves the home as a result of it places them in a faculty space the place her beloved Tyler will bloom as a sports activities megastar; she neglects Chloe, Chris’s favorite, who’s depressed over sure tragedies which have befallen her mates. The home might be just a little too costly for them; Rebecca, who drinks an excessive amount of, has possibly minimize some monetary and authorized corners to get a mortgage or for different causes. We (and the implacably judging ghost) see her having secret, tense telephone conversations and deleting emails. Then Chloe begins her fateful romance with Tyler’s good friend Ryan (West Mulholland).
After all, there’s a distinction between characters getting freaked out for a millionth of a second by suspecting the ghost’s invisible presence and the ghost freaking them out for a significantly better size of time by really intervening of their lives. And the ghost’s behaviour is arguably not constant; having protected Chloe from one thing horrible early on, it’s maybe not completely clear, within the second, why the ghost doesn’t do that a second time when Chloe is in peril once more, in precisely the identical means. Nicely, it might be that the ghost will danger all the things to create the ultimate, horrible denouement.
Presence is flawed. It doesn’t match, say, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story or, additional again, Alejandro Amenábar’s superlative The Others. However Soderbergh directs all of it with aptitude and tempo: low price range, excessive intelligence in the best way we count on from him.
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