Presence (2024)

A rich – sorry, upper middleclass to the Americans in the room – family moves into a new house they’ve acquired somewhat cheaply, which has never been a good sign in any movie.

While everyone’s playing out a family melodrama – Mom (Lucy Liu) is overprotective and clearly prefers her dumb-ass asshole son (Eddy Maday) to her daughter (Callina Liang) who is struggling with the death of her best friend, Dad (Chris Sullivan) can’t cope with this shit – some curious things begin to happen, as if the house were haunted by some unseen presence. Which indeed it is, for the whole film is shot from subjective perspective of this invisible thing.

Eventually, things climax in a ridiculously contrived finale.

I’m not the greatest admirer of Steven Soderbergh at the best of times, but Presence is at least a helpful reminder of how difficult formal experiments are: of course you can shoot your movie completely from the perspective of an invisible presence that haunts the characters’ new home, as Soderbergh does here with expected technical accomplishment.

But once you do, if you want to make a movie instead of a formal experiment to be studied in film schools and admired by a certain kind of critic, you also have to answer the question why you’ve made this formal decision. That, Soderbergh doesn’t do at all – the film never suggests why this perspective is the best choice to tell this specific story, or that taking a look at these specific characters and their lives is more than an afterthought to solving difficult technical and logistical problems, with a bit of extremely sloppy and unimaginative “escalation” tacked onto its ending.

As a matter of fact, there isn’t very much to the story at all. David Koepp’s script feels like an attempt to make some Bergmanesque family melodrama, but lacks the psychological insight as well as the emotional draw to pull this off. In the end, it never even asks what should be a central question to the set-up: why should the audience care about these neurotic people and their rich-people problems at all? They are neither interesting nor show any depth of personality, so what is their point or that of the movie they are in, apart from showing off Soderbergh’s technical abilities. Which is a rather boring and soulless reason to make a film, to my eyes.