Presence – REVIEW

Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu in Presence


Steven Soderbergh is a director I admire the hell out of. He’s gotten very experimental lately, but he’s got a pretty versatile filmography. The Ocean’s series, Erin Brockovich, Contagion, and even Magic Mike are some of the examples from his peak popularity, but he’s also got bangers like The Informant!, Haywire, and his first true stab at horror, Unsane. I didn’t really know anything about marketing behind Presence, Soderbergh’s first of two movies this year, but NEON did a great job with getting the word about Longlegs last summer. The big problem with that, though, is that I didn’t think Longlegs was scary. Good movie, sure, but I wouldn’t call it a scary movie. There are parts of me that wouldn’t even call it a horror movie, but that’s not the point. Presence ended up having a smaller scale of marketing, but still with that “scariest movie of the year” billing. Presence isn’t a horror movie, full stop. I didn’t particularly enjoy this movie, but it’s just not. It’s a little family drama with an experimental point of view. If you don’t know, Presence is basically a ghost story from the perspective of the ghost. The camera moves around freely, turning to look at different places. There are even points where a character or two looks down at the audience and the camera backs away. That’s admittedly the most impressive part of Presence, its presentation being key to making this movie at least stand out from the sea of Blumhouse movies. The story that screenwriter David Koepp goes with is just so run of the mill. Family moves in and there’s some tragedy that follows them home, and only the isolated daughter can sense that the ghost is there. We don’t exactly break new ground storywise, but some of the dialogue is shockingly bad. Koepp certainly has shown that he has a good track record; Jurassic Park, the first Raimi-directed Spider-Man, Panic Room, and the first Mission: Impossible are just some of his credits. This guy knows how to write, but another look also says that Koepp also wrote the Mummy reboot with Tom Cruise (as much as I personally enjoy that movie), as well as having writing credits on the last two Indiana Jones movies. I’m not even sure that the actors could get a grip on the clunky dialogue, which I guess I’ve noticed in a couple of Soderbergh’s movies, but it’s definitely the most prominent here. Chris Sullivan probably does the best as the father, but even Lucy Liu just never really gelled with the movie. There are some neat camera tricks when the ghost tries to communicate with the family. Presence just may be something that lands with me on a rewatch, but instead, it just ended up being an underbaked family drama that was marketed as a horror movie. I’m hoping that Soderbergh’s next movie in a couple months is better.


Ryan’s Grade: C-