A family moves into a new house, unaware that the residence is already home to an invisible entity.
Already dealing with the death of her best friend, daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) begins to suspect something is off about this new environment…
I have been looking forward to Presence for awhile. I may not love every Soderbergh movie but by god is he interesting.
And I find a lot of his movies have a long tail - I did not like The Informant! when I first watched it.
By complete coincidence, this viewing coincided with a binge watch of some other haunted house movies, 2/3 of the Amityville and Poltergeist movies beforehand.
Presence takes the basic premise of those movies and repositions the story from the point of view of the Entity (no, not that one).
The hook of the movie is that the film plays out from the entity’s point of view. The characterisation of the entity is entirely contextual.
We have some familiar tropes - like a clairvoyant who attempts to figure out who the entity is, and why it is attached to the house - but no concrete answers.
The entity seems to be more curious about its new co-inhabitants than adversarial.
And while the film suggests some level of sensitivity in Liang’s Chloe, there is no attempt to bring any kind of more defined (or generic) religious component.
While the film is shot entirely in the first-person perspective, the filmmakers do not attempt long takes. For a movie that requires a lot of moving camera-work, it does not draw attention to itself.
We watch the characters at a remove, with a lot of scenes that play out from distant stationary shots.
The family at the centre of the story seem to be disconnected, not just from this environment, but each other.
There is a lot of potential to the film, but I found the script to be a bit of a drag.
While Liang is empathetic and makes her role interesting, the characters are all fairly standard types.
The film I would compare this the most to is Kimi. That film is similarly small-scale, but the characters and the situation feel more fleshed out.
I would be keen to re-watch Presence, but on this viewing I left slightly underwhelmed.
It racks up the tension slightly towards the end, but it feels like a proof of concept for something else.
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