RATING
Director(s): Steven Soderbergh
Country: United States
Author: David Koepp
Actor(s): Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang
Written by Tom Augustine.
It’s worth thinking, now that Soderbergh has a movie with this title, what a presence the auteur himself has been in Hollywood cinema for decades. Apart from a very brief retirement between Behind the Candelabra in 2013 and Logan Lucky in 2017, Soderbergh has pumped work out at levels that rival Hong Sang-soo or Woody Allen in his heyday. What’s remarkable is the level of consistency Soderbergh managed throughout his many different periods. His first film, sex, lies & videotape is as thrilling and thorny a debut as American cinema has ever had. Soderbergh churned out no less than five – count ‘em – era-defining works between 1998 and 2001, Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovitch, Traffic, The Limey and his masterpiece Out of Sight. Even as you get beyond those golden days, most cinephiles have at least one middle-era Soderbergh that they hold dear to their heart, whether that be the Che duology, The Informant!, Contagion, Haywire, The Girlfriend Experience, or my personal favourite, Ocean’s Twelve. Soderbergh’s unique ability to blend pop cinema styles with a burgeoning digital cinema frontier have ensured that he has remained a slippery, chameleonic figure in the cinemascape. He isn’t locked down by genre, as capable of making serious-minded prestige work like Traffic or Erin Brockovitch as thrilling action like Haywire, twisty psychological thrillers like Unsane and Side Effects, bold science fiction like his Solaris remake, and his most reliable genre, the high-wire caper, encompassing the Ocean’s trilogy, Out of Sight and his finest post-retirement work, Logan Lucky.
Soderbergh’s profile has noticeably dimmed since returning, and it seems to be something he’s content with. He’s still more than capable of drawing in big-name talent – recent films have included Meryl Streep, Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek, Daniel Craig, Adam Driver, Claire Foy, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Zoë Kravitz, Gary Oldman, and so on – but the work is less insistent, comfortable with being oddball curios and technical dalliances. There’s also been a slight but unmistakable shift in quality. There are highpoints – Logan Lucky, for one, while Unsane has its share of fans – but as the cinema world becomes more and more digitised, and fragmented, seemingly so too does Soderbergh. Much has been made of Sodey’s affection for shooting on an iPhone, a commitment to the ‘you can make a film on your phone these days!’ adage that got old in 2016; a looser, more technically liberated yet flimsier style whose affect has carried through even into non-iPhone films. Soderbergh’s career seemed to have hit its nadir with Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a miserable threequel to his so-so male stripper film from 2012 that somehow preceded an unlikely masterwork in the sequel Magic Mike XXL, for which Assistant Director Gregory Jacobs took the helm. Last Dance was a step back in almost every way, most crucially in the fact that it was no longer fun. Presence, his latest, is his most rigorous technical exercise since at least No Sudden Move, which shares an affinity for wide, wide lenses. It’s also the first of three movies to be released in very quick succession: Black Bag, a promising looking spy film with Cate Blanchett, and then The Christophers, starring Ian McKellen. While it’s a step up from Last Dance, it’s not quite enough of one to signal the beginning of a renaissance (yet).
Industrious American auteur Steven Soderbergh continues a productive era of digital tinkering with this odd ghost story told entirely from the point of view of the restless spirit itself. Strong performances and a knockout finale impress but never quite shake the feeling that Presence remains hemmed in by its formal conceit.
The big stylistic conceit of Presence is its use of point of view. Confined entirely to one house, Soderbergh shot and edited the film himself, taking on the perspective of a ghost residing in the walls of a home that is bought by an attractive young family with their share of skeletons in the closet. There’s Rebecca (Lucy Liu), the workaholic mother caught up in some shady dealings, her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), a kindhearted galoot, and their children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), who’s struggling with the death of her close friend Nadia. As the spirit roams around the house, taking in the troubled lives of the new occupants, it becomes clear that it has some connection to Chloe, and is wanting to make itself heard. It’s worth noting, though, that Presence is not a horror – indeed, it’s barely a thriller until the last ten minutes – a fact that may be disappointing to those who were enticed by the film’s effectively creepy poster. It’s more of a piece with films like The Sixth Sense or A Ghost Story – indeed the film I was most reminded of was Robert Zemeckis’ recent disasterpiece Here, another film with a slavish commitment to the stylistic bit. Presence is a better film than that, though the same problems persist. For a stylistic gambit, it’s a strangely tension-draining one. Much of the pleasure of a ghost story is in the feeling that the spirits are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In Presence, we know where the ghost is at all times – they’re our window into the world. Moreso, as Soderbergh flits through the house in extended one-shot takes (he reportedly wore martial arts slippers to ensure quiet fluidity of movement), it’s hard not to shake the mental image of the director wielding the camera, undercutting the sense of verisimilitude. At its weakest moments, it can feel fatally stagey, the material begging for a more lenient master that might lean into the traditional means by which enjoyment can be drawn out of such a story.
That is not to say Presence is without its charms. The central quartet are doing excellent work – particularly Sullivan, who is an intriguing, gentle voice of reason within a disintegrating, increasingly toxic family environment. Liu is underutilised but has a wonderful moment in the film’s coda that reminds us what a natural star she is. As the spiritual centre of the story, Liang is also very good – an emerging talent, she demonstrates an ability to hold a scene and maintain the dramatic pulse of the action, often working at loggerheads with the restraints of the film’s style. The script from David Koepp – also on a slight downward turn since his heyday as scribe of Jurassic Park, Spiderman and Mission: Impossible – is narratively tight, even as some hammy dialogue threatens to derail entire scenes (please talk to teenagers before writing them, I beg). The culmination of the story, in a satisfying, circular twist that throws the preceding action into stark, tragic light, elevates the entirety of Presence. It is only by the film’s ending that the spectre of what this film is actually trying to be can really make itself known.
Presence is in cinemas now.