'Presence' Is Soderbergh at His Stoopidest

The acclaimed director's first-person haunted house movie is painfully moronic.

Presence is the new film from acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh (Out of Sight, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, etc.) and well-compensated screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, etc.). The premise is one we’ve seen a trillion times before - a family moves into a haunted house - but with a unique twist: the entire film is told from the P.O.V. of the ghost. And I mean that in a literal sense: like The Lady in the Lake or, more recently, Nickel Boys, the whole movie is shot in the first-person, as though we’re seeing through the eyes of the ghost.

Given the set-up and the talent involved, you might expect Presence to be a lot of things… but you’re probably not expecting it to be so very, incredibly, deeply stupid.

It’s also disturbing, although not the way you’d expect from a haunted house flick.

The family in Presence consists of parents Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan, a.k.a. Taserface from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) and adolescents Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). Rebekah is a terrible mother; she very openly adores Tyler, a jockish swimmer, and cares little for Chloe, who has recently lost not one but two close friends to drug overdoses.

Soderbergh and Koepp know that Rebekah and Tyler's relationship is creepy. In their first scene alone together, she’s getting drunk while telling him how great he is and how it’s alright to do bad things if you do them for someone you love, and it feels more than a little like they might start making out; later, Rebekah all but applauds Tyler’s “hilarious” story about catfishing one of his female peers and persuading her to send nude photos, which he and his friends subsequently posted on the Internet.

However, Soderbergh and Koepp seem less attuned to the creepiness between Chris and Chloe. Chris is meant to be the “good dad,” but he’s constantly entering Chloe’s room without knocking, often while she’s wearing a towel or revealing pajamas, and Chloe never objects. A scene where he sits on the edge of her bed, tells her how amazing she is, and then gives her a lingering hug feels as sexually charged as the scene between Rebekah and Tyler, only with none of the self-awareness. This becomes even more unsettling when you gradually realize that the ghost watching this family spends a decent amount of time hiding in the closet while Chloe has sex with Tyler’s popular friend, Ryan (Dark Harvest’s West Mulholland).

This might not be a problem if Presence were interested in interrogating voyeurism the way, for example, a Brian De Palma movie might (Soderbergh is his own cinematographer and camera operator, so he’s technically the actor playing the ghost). But Presence isn’t interested in interrogating much of anything. The story is about nothing. Rebekah did something illegal involving her professional life (thus her spiel to Tyler about it being okay to do bad stuff for good reasons), but that subplot never goes anywhere. Her dislike of her daughter and what that might mean for Chloe remains unexplored. Chloe is the only one in the family to initially sense the titular specter, and Rebekah and Tyler just think she’s nuts, but the movie never makes room to explore the ways abused and traumatized women are so often dismissed as crazy.

Presence doesn’t even really work as a simple popcorn thriller: the characters are too one-dimensional for us to care about (you will be acutely aware that these are teenagers as imagined by sexagenarians, and Mulholland and Maday, especially, really struggle to make the leaden dialogue sound even vaguely human), and the plotting is, as I said before…

FULL SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.

In due time, we come to realize that Ryan is, in fact, responsible for the deaths of Chloe’s friends, and is planning to kill Chloe as well; eventually, we also learn that the ghost that has been watching the family this whole movie is actually Tyler, who has come back to make sure that his living self stops Ryan from murdering Chloe (got all that?). Never mind the time-traveling gymnastics required to make this reveal work; a fantastical movie such as this one is allowed some leeway to bend the rules of logic.

But Presence absolutely breaks the rules of logic.

In one scene, prior to learning that the ghost and Tyler are one and the same, the spirit stops Chloe from drinking an orange juice Ryan has drugged by knocking the glass off of Chloe’s table before she can imbibe it. But in a later sequence, the ghost allows Tyler - i.e., the ghost himself - to chug down a drugged drink, and then allows Chloe to do the same. If the ghost can interact with physical objects, why does it opt not to stop Tyler or Chloe from drinking the spiked beverages in this later scene? For that matter, given that Ryan drugs the drinks in the family kitchen, why does the ghost not knock the laced glasses over then and there to stop them from ever getting anywhere near Chloe or Tyler?

Are we meant to think nothing of the fact that Ghost Tyler spends so much time watching his sister fuck his friend? How incestuous is this goddamn family, anyway? And how did the filmmakers think they could have this much sexual impropriety between family members and not address it in any meaningful way?

And even if you put that aside, how did Soderbergh and Koepp dream up the monumentally stupid ending?

See, partway through the film, when Tyler is being a prick to Chloe, Chris admonishes Tyler, telling his son, “It wouldn’t kill you to just once stand up for your sister!”

Then, near the end of the film, after Ryan has drugged Tyler and Chloe and is about to suffocate Chloe to death, Ghost Tyler awakens Alive Tyler, who promptly rushes upstairs to save Chloe; in the ensuing struggle, Tyler and Ryan crash through Chloe’s window and fall to their deaths.

So it actually did kill Tyler to just once stand up for his sister.

To be clear, I’m not saying Tyler should have let Chloe die; I’m saying David Koepp has written the single silliest bit of foreshadowing I can remember in modern cinema. Like. YEESH.

And then, just when you think this movie couldn’t get any more idiotic, it leaps ahead some time to find Chloe, Chris, and Rebekah in the process of moving out of the house… but only Rebekah seems distraught that Tyler has died. I mean, Chris and Chloe are just, like, fine, I guess? So the movie has the same simplistic morality as an ‘80s slasher film: Rebekah and Tyler are mean to Chloe, so Tyler has to die and Rebekah has to suffer, but Chloe and Chris don’t have any emotional fallout of their own. It’s weird.

Presence’s shortcomings would likely be less aggravating if Soderbergh wasn’t involved. The guy has certainly made some clunkers in the past (Haywire, Ocean’s Twelve, The Good German, etc.), but he’s still one of our most vaunted living filmmakers, and what he’s made here is roughly on par with bargain barrel dreck like Night Swim and Five Nights at Freddy's. I don’t care how much you respect Soderbergh’s other work, or how bored you are: you’ve got better things to do with your time than this.