Think of the place you find yourself most at home. Your painstakingly decorated and personalized bedroom, perhaps, or a cozy closet insulated from the troubles of the world. It doesn’t matter what this place is like, only that it’s yours.
But what if it wasn’t?
Presence, the new film by Ocean’s 11 director Steven Soderbergh, takes place in a haunted house. Not the kind occupied by machete-wielding clowns or chainsaw-whirling psychos, but a family seemingly more dangerous to one another than any masked murderer. In the film’s opening scene, mom Rebecca (Lucy Liu), a vague accountant-type, closes a deal on a stunning suburban home with only a cursory consultation of her gentle husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), meek daughter Chloe (Julia Fox) and exalted son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and no discussion at all with the ghost already inhabiting the property.
Rather than causing paintings to bleed and cutlery to fly around, though, the titular presence simply observes the family. The poltergeist peers over Rebecca’s shoulder as she commits financial crimes under her husband’s nose and listens through the door as Chris confides in a friend with his suspicions. It watches Chloe as she sobs herself to sleep grieving Nadia, a friend who died of a drug overdose and silently judges Tyler as he falls in with the wrong crowd.
What makes this particular ghost story unique is perspective: Presence is shot entirely in the first person, the camera taking the place of the ghostly entity’s gaze. This immediately invites some uncomfortable considerations–what motives does the entity have? What role are we, the audience, playing as we embody the bodiless? There’s a sense of guilt that comes with this omniscience, especially as the entity becomes more interested in Chloe and inserts itself in intimate, private moments. We feel simultaneously confined in the house, yet are granted supernatural access to those living within, spying through cracks in doors and through windowpanes in a voyeuristic spectacle that makes skin crawl.
What I found most fascinating about the film is the presence’s inability to be conventionally described as a character. It has no physical form yet interacts with the environment and even moves like a person would, rather than smoothly gliding around like a drone, surveillance camera or normative supernatural being. The presence has no dialogue nor internal monologue, yet Soderbergh manages to imbue it with feelings and motivations including a kind of curious capriciousness that evades distinct analysis in human emotional terms but immediately registers as a form of personality. One might be tempted, as Chloe and her family are, to map the presence onto a particular person, and by the end, Soderbergh seems to confirm our classical poltergeist suspicions. But before then, the presence is an amorphous, protean thing, simultaneously impacting and reacting to the events that unfold as the family of four falls apart.
There are no conventional jumpscares in Presence. Instead, Soderbergh cultivates a sense of the uncanny, coined by Freud in German as unheimlich, or “not of the home.” Chloe figures out something is up but can’t competently describe or react to it. The presence, even though it is invisible, dodges direct eye contact with humans – much of the film is shot at oblique angles that keep viewers on their toes just as the increasing interpersonal tension and strange happenings contribute to the family’s unease. Presence grapples with the problem of free will, and the very existence of the ghostly presence calls into question the notion of such an idea. What is to be done if even one’s home cannot be secured from the outside world? One might be faulted for letting evil in, but what does it mean if it was already there?
These broad, philosophical questions are intertwined with a grim exploration of consent and how easily it can be subverted by those who seek to take, especially from the emotionally fraught. Presence is indeed fraught–the family drama is ugly and real, with messy strings running from and between the adults and children. Despite its cold, sleek presentation, Presence is an emotional film that tests the security of the self more so than the security of space.
Presence is liable to keep one up at night–not from fear, but rumination. Like the paranormal entities I want to believe in, it defies outright definition, and that’s where I think the ghost hunters get it wrong. They want to know what the ghost is and how it came to be. Presence asks what the ghost means and why it came to be.
