‘Presence’ is a ghost story like no other | movie review

Unfolding from the perspective of a ghost haunting their house, a family deals with family tensions in Presence.

This review was originally published out of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.

In many ways, director Steven Soderbergh's Presence is a classic haunted house movie. An idyllic family moves into their dream home in the suburbs, only for it to turn into a nightmare when daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) begins to notice something is amiss inside the house. It starts small. She notices a notebook she thought she had placed on her desk now resting on her bed. A disembodied breath on her neck that she explains away with the classic, “It was the wind.” There are haunts, frustrating skepticism, psychic mediums—the works.

However, this is no normal ghost story. Like many of our ghosts, the specter lurks in Chloe's closet. We know this because we watch the movie unfold from its point of view.

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There's an uneasy feeling as we sweep through the empty house, visiting room after room, before the family enters for the first time with their real estate agent (a punchy cameo from Julia Fox). The sensation of taking the role of an unseen voyeur into this family's life feels creepy—like the infamous opening shot from Michael Myers's perspective in Halloween—especially when the specter dares to approach one of the family members. While most of them are unaware, Chloe senses something immediately. From there, still viewing the story through the ghost's eyes, we get glimpses into the family's lives.

There's headstrong, controlling matriarch Rebecca (Lucy Liu), who makes her preference for her athlete son Tyler (Eddy Maday) painfully evident—“I've never felt more connected to another human,” she says, to which he replies, “What about Chloe?” On the other hand, warm, caring patriarch Chris (Chris Sullivan) is more empathetic to Chloe's plights. While she assumes the role of the typical black-sheep teenager in a ghost story, we learn it's not without reason—her friend Nadia recently died of an apparent overdose. The ghost watches as these family tensions unfold. After a while, it begins to feel like the phantom itself has emotions—as Chloe's relationship with her mother sours, she fights with her brother, and she catches the eye of her brother's friend and the school's popular boy, Ryan (West Mulholland).

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Presence hits other familiar beats of the ghost story—like the family's general skepticism when Chloe insists a ghost is haunting her room—before a dramatic moment finally forces them to believe her. But knowing the reason behind those supernatural moments makes them feel new, as if you've never seen them in another movie before. In a way, the film feels somewhat plotless and meandering—but in a surprisingly comforting way, like you're simply drifting through this family's life.

At its core, however, Presence is a family melodrama—filled with biting infighting, teenage and marital angst, and a few, perhaps improbable, twists. However, shifting our perspective to that of the ghost—and therefore limiting us to bits and pieces of the story—smooths out the narrative's jagged edges. Instead, it leaves us to contemplate some of the film's more profound lines of dialogue, like when Chris asks Rebecca, “You ever notice how your advice always corresponds with us doing nothing?”

For some, Presence will just be another experimental work from Soderbergh in his post-“retirement” era. However, there's something more profound beneath its cinematic tricks. There's a quiet melancholy, comforting in its relatability. Its portrayal of loneliness and isolation—so easily felt in life, even when you're not alone—strikes a chord. And perhaps most telling is that, by the end of its breezy 85-minute runtime, you might just find yourself missing being someone's ghost in a dark corner of their closet.

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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