Presence (2024)

Rated R for sex, language, murder, and attempted rape.  The odd thing is that this movie could have been an easy PG-13 because each of those elements are so short in the movie and often just tacked on to make the movie seem a little more edgy.  If it wasn't so boring, there would probably be a way to make the movie viewable for younger audiences.  Still...R.

DIRECTOR:  Steven Soderbergh

I almost got away with not watching this.  There would have been this thought that this was one of those fancy pants, A24 wannabe deep horror movies that I never got around to.  But I've seen it.  I have seen it and I also know that it was one of the most deeply disappointing movies I've seen in a while.  Maybe I'm hating on it because I had modest expectations that were not met.  Maybe I'm hating on it because I now have to write about this movie when I have a billion other things to do.  All I can tell you is this:  Presence is kind of terrible.

Now, I can't say that it's objectively terrible. I actually don't like that term.  Besides the fact that entertainment is entirely subjective, Presence, if it wasn't made by Steven Soderbergh would be a "good first attempt at a movie."  I'll be completely candid.  I didn't know that Soderbergh made this when I went into it.  The only thing that I knew about the movie was that it took place from the ghost's perspective.  I mean, considering that I just wrote about In a Violent Nature, a movie that takes a similar premise of telling the story from the slasher's perspective, I knew that the concept had legs.  But while In a Violent Nature --a movie that I acknowledged was a bit flawed in its own way --does something interesting with the role of the first person camera attached to the supernatural being, Presence seems like it is trying to ride high on its concept and practically nothing else.  And even the first person perspective almost detracts from the movie instead of adding to this.

I'm in a pickle now because I want to talk about how the first person perspective is wasted as is the rest of the film.  I really need to keep my focus because I'm trying to knock this bad boy out as fast as I can because I'm starting to stack up some Zatoichi movies in my wake.  I want to talk first about the premise.  The beginning of the movie has that kind of faux A24 / Neon Films vibe of the camera meandering around the house.  The cool thing is that we get a sense of isolation and loneliness from the ghost and that is interesting.  Honestly, A Ghost Story did the same bit a little bit better, but I can't begrudge the few successes this movie has.  Now, the hopes that I had would be that we saw the frustration of this ghost leading to the haunting of the family so we could understand why ghosts behave the way that they do in film.  Unfortunately, we're a little bit in a Casper situation.  The ghost has no malevolence towards the family.  There are moments where we question why the ghost acts in seemingly violent ways.  But most of the movie involves the ghost protecting Chloe.  There isn't much of a threat to the family almost at any point in the film.  The closest we get is bringing the medium in and getting a little ripped off.  So, from a horror perspective, we don't really get the narrative of what causes ghosts to haunt people.  Instead, the ghost mostly just acts as a camera for the audience...because it literally is a camera.  For the majority of the film, you could just write off the camera as not-a-ghost and that's the only thing that Presence is adding to the party.

But let's pretend that the ghost-as-camera thing works like Soderbergh swears it does.  The actual story is almost non-existent.  Before I knew that this was a Soderbergh film, my theory was the following: this was a student short created for film school that was remade by the same person into a feature length film when the short film got more traction than he thought it would. The best part of the movie is that it is only 84 minutes.  The problem is that, even with that runtime, there isn't really 84 minutes of content.  The only recognizable name in this movie is Lucy Liu, who gives a bit of an over-the-top performance in a painfully sedate film.  Much of the movie relies on archetypes instead of nuanced characters.  Mom is evil and potentially sexually interested in her successful oldest son.  Dad is too perfect, frustrated by Mom's continual crossings of boundaries.  Chloe is the suffering rebellious teenager who can't share her feelings with the people who need her to.  Tyler is the quintessential worst jocky bully.  And then Ryan?  Ryan is such an extreme version of a villain it's hilarious.  There's nothing subtle.  When I confused this script for something that came out of film school it's because it reads like everyone has to be quickly understood.  But do you know who wrote this script?  David Koepp.  The guy who wrote Jurassic Park.  I don't even know how you got to this point.  It seems so lazy.  

And part of that is the attempt to get to its twist ending.  One of my biggest frustrations with The Great Gatsby is that the story does cartwheels to get to its shocking ending.  Don't send my boss this blog because she is adamant that The Great Gatsby is perfect.  What I do think about The Great Gatsby is that it is an incredible book that tried to get this perfect dismount of an ending, but strains the conventions of plausibility to get to that ending.  I don't think Presence is an outstanding story before the reveal at the end, but it goes through a bunch of absolutely silly moments to get to that ending.  SPOILER ALERT: The big reveal is that the ghost is Tyler.  There's a throwaway line that the medium says that ghosts experience past, present, and future all scrambled.  So Tyler is there to protect Chloe from Ryan.  That's a fun idea.  I really like that as a reveal.  After all, it explains why the ghosts looks away when Chloe is having sex.  There are small moments that tease that Tyler is the ghost.  Fun.  But here's the problem, that ending is a mess.  Tyler is a ghost protecting his sister from an untimely death even though he's still alive.  At the midway point, Tyler-as-Ghost creates a minor earthquake to stop Ryan from putting date rape drugs in her orange juice.  (Note: these kids are really into orange juice.  It could be with alcohol or it could be just orange juice.  These kids don't care.  They want the orange juice.) But Ryan tries that again and Tyler-as-Ghost doesn't do anything about it.  He instead has to wake his living self up with flashing lights so Tyler-as-Person sprints up the steps (somehow?) to save Chloe.  I don't know how living Tyler knows to do that or how to do that.  Then he...tackles him out the window?  What?  It's so silly.

Presence is an examples of filmmakers putting all of their chips into a gimmick and hoping it pays out.  It doesn't.  The rest of the movie is kind of lazy.  The story isn't that interesting. This is a short film that should not be expanded into a larger film.