Review: 'Presence'

by Mitchel Green - January 31, 2025

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

Steven Soderbergh deserves all of the credit he’s receiving for being one of the few mainstream American filmmakers willing to experiment with the form and do it within his ostensibly mainstream feature films. He isn’t always daring in his direction — I associate him with a more economical visual style than anything resembling the avant-garde à la Coppola — but he picks material that suits whatever formal conceit he wants to try. This would all be well and good if he learned how to choose a good script after all these years.

It’s not as if Soderbergh’s technical choices are so off-putting that they need a similarly bold script to rise to the occasion. Again, this is a mainstream filmmaker making mainstream movies. In the case of “Presence,” first-person and/or fly-on-the-wall observant perspectives have been used to great effect recently in the likes of “Nickel Boys” and “The Zone of Interest,” two films that were both lauded by mainstream awards bodies and the latter of which had immense box office success. The difference between those films and “Presence” is that, while the stylistic choice in those films feels as though it has a thematic as well as aesthetic purpose, Soderbergh’s decision to shoot that way seems like one that the film was birthed out of rather than it being a natural choice for the material.

As such, the dramaturgy of David Koepp’s script feels like an afterthought. Making a voiceless specter our point of view character is a choice to fit the film’s visual framework rather than say anything new about voyeurism or how people act behind closed doors. The core relationships of the family being haunted are unnecessarily packed with excess drama, much of which does not pay off by the end of the movie. The dialogue artificially creates subtext by talking with an unnatural vagueness that suggests, among other things, a possibly incestuous relationship between the mother and son and some sort of legal trouble faced by one or both of the parents because of the wife’s work. This forced ambiguity is the script’s biggest crime, as potentially interesting subplots aren’t explored past the initial mystery and don’t add anything to the experience other than the pointless teasing of the audience that there is a better story happening where you can’t see it. That’s not even mentioning the convoluted foreshadowing of the final identity of the ghost, which tells us that the ghost isn’t dead at the moment of the reveal but is actually the spirit of somebody who is going to die in the house. It’s an unclever way to get to where the story ultimately wants to go.

Even disregarding that — and many will be tempted to do that in a B-movie where the story does not take much precedence — Soderbergh’s direction is not nearly as exciting as the idea of the gimmick, and it often feels like he’s forcing us to see something rather than showing what the ghost should naturally be looking at. Take, for example, the opening shot. It’s a oner that dances around the house and shows us the layout of every room where the film will take place over the next hour and a half. This serves no purpose other than to show us what we’ll be introduced to again later, but now devoid of context. Does Soderbergh not trust the audience to grasp the entire space if we don’t see it all at once? Is he just trying to show off knowing that we won’t see something that frantic until the end? If anything, it cheapens the moment when the ghost dashes to wake the drugged brother so he can save his sister from being raped because we’ve already seen this technique. This is the biggest problem. There just isn’t much differentiation in how Soderbergh shoots most of the film, and it focuses your attention on the clumsy narrative.

“Presence” will probably be the most interesting new movie released in these first couple months of the year, but that speaks more to the laziness of whatever trash is being thrown into theaters right now. But that shouldn’t excuse it from being an underdeveloped idea for a movie. There is genuine potential in the premise and presentation, but it was never going to be unlocked by such a blandly straightforward story. Soderbergh and Koepp have teamed up for another movie releasing in March, let’s hope that one has a bit more on its mind.