by Rob DiCristino
A Steven Soderbergh ghost story.Just try to lock Steven Soderbergh down. You can’t do it! His forty-year career has defied classification at every turn, a cocktail of prestige dramas, witty comedies, stylish thrillers, and that one about the doll factory that I never seem to get around to watching. His DIY idiosyncrasies have become a brand all to themselves; Soderbergh could announce a new Matt Damon project shot on a roll of parchment paper with an Edison Kinetograph, and no one with a Letterboxd account would blink an eye. There’s a certain power to that, I think, an immunity from judgment that comes when we recognize that a true auteur’s work unfolds over a long continuum of experimentation. Soderbergh is critic-proof, really, as judging him on one film — or two, or three — is about as useful as judging an all-star baseball player on as many at-bats. His output seems fueled more by whimsy than by rigor, and it’s that dexterity that allows him to bring us two films in 2025: The Cate Blanchett spy thriller Black Bag and Presence, a ghost story shot from the point of view of its titular specter.That’s not to suggest that Presence, from a screenplay by veteran scribe David Koepp, feels half-assed. Quite the opposite! From its opening frames — in which our ghostly protagonist takes us on a tour of an otherwise empty house before settling behind the slatted doors of an upstairs closet* — Soderbergh demonstrates all the confidence and economy that makes his brand of storytelling so distinctive. After this introduction, the director (acting as his own cinematographer, as per usual) deftly chronicles the life and times of the house’s new owners: There’s the domineering A-type wife, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), eternally preoccupied by business dealings that seem to border on illegal. Then we have her husband, Chris (Chris Sullivan), a more genuine and empathetic human being who’s long-since given up trying to make his marriage work. In tow are their two teenage children: The varsity swimmer and all-around douchebag, Tyler (Eddy Maday), and Chloe (Callina Liang), the lonely, haunted, pre-goth bookworm who’s still reeling from her best friend’s recent death by overdose.
So as with all haunted house movie families, these folks have some literal and figurative baggage to unpack! Soderbergh and Koepp lay the dramatic tracks carefully in the early going, using the film’s elliptical structure to follow the discord between the characters and exhibit our narrator’s occasional intervention in their petty dramas. It takes a keen liking to Chloe, of course — Soderbergh knows his genre tropes — and her grief attunes her to its presence from the moment she walks through the door. But how much should it interfere with her and Tyler’s arguments? What about her sexual experimentation with his friend Ryan (West Mulholland), who might as well have “Date Rapist” flashing in neon letters over his head? Should it announce itself when Chris calls in a medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres) to explain all the flickering lights and unsettling sounds? This is the real fun of Presence — the realization that our ghost doesn’t even know who it is or what it wants. Does it like this family? Will it hurt them? Is it trying to escape? For a while, it seems just as lost as we are.Recent horror history is rife with this kind of formal experimentation, obviously — think about the narrative gymnastics of J. T. Mollner’s Strange Darling, the one-take madness of the French zombie apocalypse epic MadS, or even the trudging serial killer POV of Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature — but Presence feels less like a hotshot newcomer trying to reinvent the wheel than it does an old master applying his familiar expertise in a new setting. So many of Soderbergh’s films feel subjective or voyeuristic to some degree or another, and it’s an emphasis on detachment that makes every camera move in Presence feel that much more deliberate and revelatory. We feel the ghost’s embarrassment when it turns away from a disrobing Chloe. We feel its panic when it rushes downstairs to wake a sleeping Tyler in a moment of danger. We even feel a bit elated, I think, when it finds its ultimate catharsis. It’s simple, efficient, and often outstanding storytelling that allows the audience to form a genuine connection with a character it will never see in the flesh.But for all its visual charm and invention, Presence is ultimately torpedoed by a lackluster third act that trades the metaphysical nuance of its early movements for a dull and obvious murder plot that fails to take advantage of the world Soderbergh had taken such great pains to create. Koepp builds his climax around the least interesting part of his setup — imagine if Star Wars ended with Uncle Owen missing his quotas because his nephew wasn’t there to work on the farm — which leaves us to wonder if we’d just spent the last hour giving the film credit for ideas it didn’t actually have. In the end, we’re asked to feel sympathy for characters we never liked for reasons entirely out of their control or understanding. And it’s not that Presence fails to answer questions — more ambiguity would have actually been better — but rather that it expects us to be impressed by conclusions we’d already come to on our own. So while Presence is good enough for January viewing, it’s hard not to wish that Soderbergh had nailed the landing and brought us the first real masterpiece of 2025.
Presence hits U.S. theaters on Friday, January 24th.
*Full disclosure: I saw Presence just hours after David Lynch’s death was announced, so I took considerable comfort in what I chose to interpret as a Blue Velvet reference.
Dang, I hate to read the words “torpedoed by a lackluster third act.” Here’s hoping I find it to at least be decent for a January release, as you said.
ReplyDeleteAnd just like the movie you built me up just to have me get disappointed.
ReplyDeleteThat’s the DiCristino Guarantee!
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