Always Something There to Remind Me
By Matthew Eng
Presence
Dir. Steven Soderbergh, U.S., NEON
[Note: The following review contains plot spoilers.]
Since 2001, when he became the first and only filmmaker to be nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar in the same year, Steven Soderbergh has been content to draw back from the upper echelons of an industry once primed to lionize him. Instead, he has solidified himself as one of American cinema’s most venturesome and generative directors, a formal gambler, a shirker of auteurist through-lines, and a master of inconsistency. In the last ten years, Soderbergh has helmed nearly as many features, in addition to the handful of television projects that peaked with the bravura gilded-age medical drama The Knick (2014-15). The films, for their part, have been wildly, almost foreseeably uneven: for every High Flying Bird (2019), an iPhone-shot drama about a seditious, visionary Black sports agent, or Let Them All Talk (2020), a prickly comedy in which longtime pals Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Dianne Wiest reminisce and talk shit about each other on the Queen Mary 2, there’s a mixed-up, laugh-free satire like the Panama Papers docudrama The Laundromat (2019) or Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023), an inglorious, ho-hum finale to one of the century’s more joy-inspiring franchises.
All of this rattles around the brain upon encountering each new Soderbergh experiment, but especially his latest. The single-setting horror drama Presence showcases some of the director’s most uncanny visual storytelling as well as the pitfalls of poor taste down which his late films continually careen. Shot over three weeks in September 2023 in a Victorian home in suburban Cranford, New Jersey, the film follows four members of a newly settled nuclear family: workaholic mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), for whom Lean In was likely a life-changer; stoic father Chris (Chris Sullivan), who takes clandestine calls with the family attorney to discuss his liability in some shady corporate business of Rebecca’s; teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday), a star swimmer with competitive collegiate dreams: and, most crucially, younger daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who is trapped in a state of despair. As the family tours the house, led around by an avid realtor (played in a cameo by BRAT baroness Julia Fox), Chloe senses a bodiless force lurking within earshot, drawing her out of her gaunt, glassy-eyed condition.
Soderbergh establishes the film’s fundamental aesthetic gambit from its first scene, an extended one-shot in which the camera floats through the many bare rooms of the unoccupied house at dusk before settling behind the louver doors of a bedroom closet. The director, serving again as cinematographer and camera operator under his paternal pseudonym Peter Andrews, turns his Sony DSLR into a first-person character. This is an about-face for a filmmaker who has repeatedly and rightly raised objections to the futile prospect of fully integrating virtual reality and narrative cinema. “Looking into the eyes of the character that you’re following is the foundation of narrative,” Soderbergh told Film Comment in 2017. And yet our guide throughout Presence is an unseeable specter, one never definitively specified but given a potential identity when Chloe, feeling the existence of something there but not quite, whispers “Nadia?” mere inches from the lens. David Koepp’s screenplay slowly reveals through scraps of expository dialogue that Chloe is grieving the drug-related deaths of two classmates, one of whom, Nadia, was her closest friend; the loss has, in Chloe’s own words, “crack[ed] apart” the world as she once knew it.
Liang’s delicate distracted mien quietly persuades us that the character is wracked with a pain that no one—not her insensitive brother, detached mom, or soul-sick dad—can understand or ameliorate. Chloe only finds solace in a discreet sexual relationship with Tyler’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland), a popular kid with a sandy mane and a beady stare that automatically puts the viewer on alert. Their dalliances, conducted in Chloe’s bedroom while her brother is at practice and her parents are at the office, are a distraction from both interminable mourning and the increasingly palpable intrusions of a ghost bent on making its presence known. In one scene, Chloe’s binder, textbooks, and school supplies are gathered together and neatly rearranged by invisible hands, the objects gracefully gliding through the air as they move from bed to desk. The ghost later confirms its loyalty to Chloe when it disrupts a shouting match between brother and sister by lunging upstairs and trashing Tyler’s bedroom in the film’s most successful and spellbinding realization of its formal conceit. As the walls shake, trophies fly off their shelves, and a Michael Phelps poster rips in two, the family watches this sourceless paroxysm in horror, save for Chloe, whose eyes twinkle with nothing short of wonder.
These scenes and all the rest in Presence—whether spanning seconds or minutes, keyed-up or slow-boiling—resolutely follow the design of that introductory walk-through: unfolding in a single continuous take somewhere in the home, ending with an abrupt cut to black. (Since Haywire [2011], Soderbergh continues to edit his own films under the maternal pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard; in real life, his mother worked as a parapsychologist.) Creeping across rooms, skimming down stairways, and retreating into corners to rest and regard its cohabitants, the camera appears to remain embedded in the perspective of the ghost, though some moments (such as a door shutting by itself as the camera stays locked in place, capturing the room and the action in long shot) may leave one querying Soderbergh’s fidelity to this aesthetic or if there is more than one phantom haunting this house. But by (mostly?) adhering to this approach and firmly delineating its parameters early on, Soderbergh achieves an effectively fraught air from the jump so that his scenes, even at their stillest, vibrate with the breath-seizing possibility of menace; we are continually and acutely aware that the domestic fracases and solitary activities depicted are being witnessed by eyes without a face.
The portrait of a family in schism that emerges over the course Presence vacillates between the precise and the perfunctory. “It’s okay to go too far for the people you love,” Rebecca tells Tyler, the child she favors and coddles, in an early scene, suggesting a characterization of dubiously tigerish maternalism that fails to come to fruition. Liu is disappointingly wasted here as a half-hearted bystander to the breakdown, rotely criticized by Chris for her disinterest in their daughter’s turmoil and tight-lipped about the fuzzy professional debacle in which she is currently embroiled. The actress is more persuasive when playing engrossed, giggling audience to her son’s boastful account of a reprehensible catfishing prank played on a female classmate, a story that only father and daughter have the common sense to be immediately appalled by.
Presence’s final act hinges on the brutality verging on bloodlust of teenage boys as it is revealed that Chloe’s hookup Ryan is a psychopathic killer responsible for the deaths of her friends. This is where Koepp’s script and Soderbergh’s film nosedive into callous and artless inanity. In one of the most noxious scenes in the director’s career, we watch with unstinting closeness as Ryan roofies and attempts to suffocate and rape Chloe before a ghostly intervention thwarts him. It is not a novel insight to say that Soderbergh’s recent films live or die by their screenwriters, but the difference between a Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich [2000]) or a Tarell Alvin McCraney (High Flying Bird) and a David Koepp has seldom been clearer. A longtime friend of Soderbergh’s, Koepp is a veteran studio scribe who has penned everything from Death Becomes Her (1992) to Spider-Man (2002) to the Ricky Gervais vehicle Ghost Town (2008), one of several midrange movies he has also helmed.
Following his first collaboration with Soderbergh on the enjoyable if politically evasive surveillance thriller Kimi (2022), Koepp furnishes his screenplay herewith a crass and regressive worldview, in which the issue of adolescent overdose fatalities can be ascribed to a single, sick individual acting out of arbitrary malevolence. (Fentanyl is arguably the real presence haunting the film.) Soderbergh seems as beholden to—or, at the very least, blithely unquestioning of—his writer’s impulses as he is to his subjective camera, which progressively feels like a gimmick. What’s worse is that his filmmaking in these latter scenes proves incapable of vivifying or lending nuance to any of the complex subjects broached so that the protracted poisoning and sexual assault of a teenage girl by a ranting fiend simply functions as a means for ticking-clock suspense.
If Chloe’s sorrow and the disturbance it unleashes upon her household threaten to become as cursory and plot-motivated as these climactic reveals and contortions, it is only through the soulful commitment of Liang and Sullivan that Presence achieves emotional resonance. Sullivan, a brawny, buoyant standout as a sentimental and duplicitous ambulance driver on The Knick, delivers the film’s best performance as a pillar of parental devotion. The actor is playing an idealized dad, yet the patient, compassionate, and intuitive bond he forges with Liang is true in its earnest desire and affectingly stilted attempts to grasp and redress the suffering of a child no longer a child’s age. Unlike the ghosts behind the machine, these two never falter.