The Ghost’s-Eye View of Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence”

The Ghost’s-Eye View of Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence”


Although Steven Soderbergh started out as an independent filmmaker, he may be Hollywood’s last true believer. He made fine studio movies back when star-studded genre pictures were still studios’ stock-in-trade; witness “Out of Sight” (1998), “Erin Brockovich” (2000), and the “Ocean’s” trilogy (2001-07). Now that studios are focussing mainly on franchises and remakes, Soderbergh is working independently again, but he’s continuing to make the kind of genre films at which Hollywood used to excel—the heist film “Logan Lucky” (2017), the thriller “Unsane” (2018), and even “Magic Mike” (2012)—and doing so in a homespun way, with an air of playfulness and improvisation, sometimes shooting on iPhones. The cinematic house of worship may be closed, but he’s holding services at home with devotion as earnest as ever, though he can’t resist a winking acknowledgment of the homey clutter in plain sight.

In his new film, “Presence,” Soderbergh approaches domesticity with a similar blend of solemnity and whimsy—in this case, packed into the venerable genre of horror. The movie is a metaphysical mystery, a sort of American gothic in which a warm and inviting old suburban house becomes the shivery site of a haunting, a confinement, and a menace. At the start, the house in question is, to all appearances, empty—at least, it’s devoid of furniture, because it’s for sale. A real-estate agent named Cece (Julia Fox) arrives just ahead of her clients, a well-to-do family of four—parents Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) and their teen-age children, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). Cece hints that the house, new to the market and situated in a coveted school district, will sell quickly. In mere moments, Rebecca, a hard-driving businesswoman, makes the deal.

By that point, Soderbergh has already, cannily and uncannily, established the premise of the title: the house isn’t actually empty, and the family won’t be there alone. The director conjures the house’s spectral presence by means of an unusual cinematic device that dominates the movie from start to finish: the camera embodies the perspective of that invisible character. At the very beginning of the film, the house is introduced in a single shot that peers through windows, roves from room to room, and heads downstairs. Then the scene of the sale is presented in a gliding, gyrating take that, again, ranges widely through the house; as the negotiation takes place, the camera follows the daughter upstairs and into a bedroom, where she turns and looks at the camera as if aware of being followed.

Soderbergh—doing his own cinematography, as often, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews—crafts a clever style to develop the identification of the camera’s gaze with that of the haunting spirit. For starters, the camera never goes outside. All the movie’s depicted events either take place within the house’s walls or are visible through its windows or doors, and the conspicuous oddness of this trope conveys a sense of surveillance: the spirit, though unwilling or unable to leave the house, is paying close attention to the surroundings, as well as to the doings within. Scenes unfold in extended, impulsively mobile shots, which create the impression of a ghost who is no mere passive observer but an alert and active mind. Conjuring a consciousness with a will of its own, the camera ignores conventional commercial-movie practice, sometimes leaving characters behind as it prowls through the house, and poking into rooms to satisfy its own curiosity, for reasons that only gradually reveal their dramatic significance.

Young Chloe is soon shown to be the focus of the spirit’s attention and the center of the story. Her best friend, Nadia, has recently died, in a drug-related incident, as has another teen girl from the area, and the family is under the pall of Chloe’s grief. Her compassionate dad wants her to see a therapist; Rebecca and Tyler (who’s a competitive swimmer with an insolent streak) are impatient with her, and even blame her for burdening the family. What’s more, Tyler—perhaps sarcastically, perhaps sincerely—suggests that Chloe, too, is abusing drugs, potentially endangering his competitive focus, to say nothing of herself. As for the ghost, it is not merely watching Chloe—who has a connection to it that no other family member shares—but watching over her, as if sensing that she is in danger. Rebecca is also in some kind of trouble—she’s involved in financial chicanery and other furtive dealings that, her husband knows, come with legal risks. Inevitably, of course, the dénouement, in elucidating the family story and revealing what links the siblings’ rivalry to their parents’ conflicts, also shows what connects Chloe with the spirit world.

“Presence” is a mystery, and a good one, which means that disclosing its revelations would spoil the fun. The film would also repay a second viewing, because details sprinkled throughout take on their meaning only in hindsight. In a way, the clearest review would suggest that you see the movie now and we’ll talk later. This in itself marks the movie as a throwback: it’s unapologetically plot-centered. Although the mortal backstory and the threats to the family turn out to be truly horrific, the mystery is as airtight as that of any studio-era entertainment. Yet Soderbergh’s unusual method recalls another of this season’s major movies, one that is much more than a tense thriller: “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s adaptation of the novel by Colson Whitehead, about Black teen-agers incarcerated in a brutal, segregated reform school in Florida, in the nineteen-sixties. Ross develops a method—showing the action from the two main characters’ points of view in long, uninterrupted takes—that’s akin to Soderbergh’s device, at least superficially. But Ross employs his method to create a depth of subjectivity that matches Whitehead’s language, and an intense physicality that surpasses the familiar tropes of cinematic representation. With “Presence,” the eye of the ghost is a matter not of representation but of plot—subtract the subjective camerawork that incarnates an increasingly active spirit, and there’s no movie.

Still, Soderbergh’s premise is no mere gimmick. Working with a script by David Koepp, he infuses his dramatic mechanism with substantial themes. The dynamic of family life that the ghost witnesses is seen early on to be suspect; eventually, it comes to echo wider corruption. Soderbergh is far from a frivolous filmmaker, but he realizes both his devilishly clever premise and its serious implications with the same tight-lipped exuberance. In the depths of grief, Chloe is reading a book by Alice Hughes—the name of the author played by Meryl Streep in Soderbergh’s 2020 comedic drama, “Let Them All Talk.” That movie spotlights the conflict between Alice, a writer of literary fiction whose ostensibly personal stories are revealed to have been cribbed, and a writer of genre mysteries, whose work Alice disdains as “Styrofoam” and “jigsaw puzzles.” It’s clear where Soderbergh’s allegiances lie.

Soderbergh fills “Presence” with idiosyncratic incidentals that are piquant enough on their own but ultimately reveal their place in his free-floating puzzle. (There’s a riff involving a hundred-year-old mirror of silver nitrate—something of a surrogate for the near-magical properties of classic movies.) The story’s greater implications emerge incrementally, and along the way it can feel as if Soderbergh is infusing his clever narrative gamesmanship with a prefabricated importance. But the spectacular ending delivers a dose of philosophical heft and lends retrospective resonance to the movie’s unusual form.

With “Presence,” Soderbergh, a true believer in genre, acts like a true believer in the mysticism that this movie’s particular genre depends on. He can’t resist the ultimate temptation: the ghost, which at first moves through the house leaving no corporeal trace, eventually intervenes in the life of the household physically, drastically, and decisively. Still, this gleeful cinematic inventiveness reverberates with sincere purpose and is of a piece with the story’s explicit embrace of yet another form of belief, organized religion—specifically, Catholicism—and its confidence that higher powers are at work in human lives. It’s hardly a coincidence that Soderbergh’s creative deployment of point-of-view shots echoes the work of the greatest genre filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, who’s also one of the greatest filmmakers of Catholic inspiration. Hitchcock’s point-of-view shots evoke characters looking at the world with yearning and horror, guilt and responsibility, and those are also the emotional underpinnings of Soderbergh’s movie. “Presence” manifests the ultimate faith—belief in miracles—and sardonically suggests that nothing less will keep the vulnerable safe from the reach of human depravity. ♦



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