Presence (2024)

Director Steven Soderbergh continues active in his so-called retirement since 2013 with the star-studded spy movie Black Bag and this somewhat unusual ghost story. Lucy Liu is impressive as Rebekah, the mama bear head of this family unit of four. She has a decided, unhealthy preference for their son Tyler (Eddy Maday). She’s doing everything she can to launch him into life with all the advantages, including buying a home and moving into a school district that will work better for him. The dynamic forces husband and father Chris (Chris Sullivan) to take on defending their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who recently lost her best friend to a drug overdose and has begun showing signs of misbehavior due to the grief. Chris keeps suggesting things like new therapists, new treatments, new drugs, but Rebekah insists what she needs is time. She might be right, in a way, but mainly she doesn’t really seem to care. They have bought the haunted house (not knowing it is haunted, which even the realtor doesn’t seem to know, though she might be lying) because it puts Tyler in a school district where he can compete more effectively as an athlete—Rebekah’s idea. What makes Presence unusual is that it is largely told from the point of view of the ghost. It takes a little while to figure out. At first the swirling camera just seems like the restless camera Soderbergh has frequently resorted to, but gradually the conceit becomes more obvious. It’s a pretty good story about a dysfunctional family, though as a ghost story it’s somewhat cliched, turning to grief and trauma as the single source of all the supernatural business. And there are convenient and familiar plot developments we’ve seen a lot, such as a serial killer with a fiendish manner of killing. But Soderbergh has skills, and Presence builds to a high peak of intensity that makes it a reasonably good movie overall (likely helped a little by a short running time under 90 minutes). I’m a little tired myself of the grief and trauma freight train running through so much horror these days, but I’d say Presence is worth a look—more for the dysfunctional family, harrowingly detailed, than the clumsy and helpless ghost, which mostly comes to feel like a device.