Another day, another formal Steven Soderbergh audacious experiment to push the boundaries of whatever genre he feels like sinking his teeth into. “Presence” looked to be a slam dunk for someone of his caliber and talent but is this experiment a success in ambition, practice, concept and execution?
It caught me in a good mood.
Soderbergh impresses me as someone who continues to play and flirt with form as much as he does genres but this is perhaps his most impressive outing to me. Stripped-down and modest with some clever misdirection sprinkled in, the sheer gumption of Soderbergh’s commitment to this idea is boundless and his steady hand gives each scene some tender and warmth.
See this? THIS is how you use limited spatial confinement to extract maximal tension from a minimalist premise. Despite being isolated to a single location and getting a feel for the environment pretty early on, April Lasky’s production design does capture a distant, mute feeling of detachment in the house long after the family moves in. Not too claustrophobic in tight corners but everything is small and intimate enough for that to pass.
Presentation maintains the presence (no pun intended) and set-up of a Blumhouse feature with the sensibility of a jumpy low-stakes found-footage film and while mostly condensed to long-takes, wide angles and a few jittery twitches, the cinematography remains hypnotic throughout and successfully situated itself as big of a main character as the cast parading the house. Very delicate and expressive with its slow movements and the editing playfully taps into that growing sense of stability while being mindful of its methodical pace.
Momentum might be very stop/start as way to pass the time but it avoids turning clunky, it’s very high on emotional tension with considerable weight, Zack Ryan’s score has this whining, gothic trill to compliment its otherwise orchestral melodramatic bombast, the costumes, while muted, are pretty indicative of the characters personalities and it’s a tightly-paced 85 minutes, revealing just enough to keep you hooked while leaving room to uncover more on rewatches.
Walking through the everyday mundanities of suburban life, this cast carry that uniform ghastly portrait of a family unit that shares physical space but lacks intimacy. Even when the dialogue feels stiff and lacks authenticity, you still feel entangled within the plight of their strained bond. Chris Sullivan is very convincing as the cornered father desperate for stability and a way out but it’s Callina Liang who holds the fort as the emotional anchor.
Imagine telling a story drama about personal morality, responsibility, self-inquiry, and personal evolution…..from the perspective of someone who’s not even alive anymore. Sure, there have been narratives where the family ends up being the more disruptive force than the undead presence already lurking in the area but this take on that tale is a lot more subdued while maintaining a comfortable degree of heft. Every character in this has their own stressor that greatly impacts the family whether aware of that or not and while not every thread gets resolved, it constantly ties into the reality that people are more or less the sum total of their choices and actions and can bear a penalty in the afterlife for going down bad roads. Even the supernatural poltergeist that controls the first-person POV is given emotional nuance and empathy through its curiosity at human compassion, grief, frustration and sense of longing, acting both as a narrative device and audience surrogate, disrupting tense moments in ways that feel oddly satisfying.
Couple that with its brief but still powerful dissection on the fentanyl crisis and it runs shy of avoiding feeling like a PSA: calling out contemporary fear and examining our vital need for connection, amongst the suffering, self-doubtful and unheard.
Whether or not I like to nitpick something depends on the situation but here, it comes in the form of a twist that didn’t make much sense at first. A good job is done building up to a particular moment in the end we don’t want to happen but then another detail is added on top of that and it kind of cheapens the tension a little bit. Even when we find out who the ghost eventually is, the circumstances that built up to that reveal are not lost on me. There’s also the flagrant annoyance that this was advertised as a horror when it really wasn’t, with no scares to speak of. It’s one of the main things the presentation has going for it, being designed to avoid the expectations the marketing placed on it…..
…..but that just goes to show how manipulative marketing can be towards benefiting or tanking a project.
I always struggle with whether or not I’m jotting down enough to properly covey my thoughts and while I’m certain someone else will be able to put this better, the reality is Every experiment we do sets a precedent for improvement or to take ourselves further. Steven Soderbergh’s latest experiment does exactly that.
