The tightly constructed story unfolds chronologically in scenes of varying length that end and begin abruptly, and are separated by a few seconds of black. As time passes and periodically leaps forward — one minute, the house is empty, the next it’s inhabited — the other family members come into focus, including the hard-charging mother, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and the affable father, Chris (Chris Sullivan). They’re clearly not happy and one reason may be Rebekah’s squirmy devotion to their son, Tyler (Eddy Maday), a star high-school athlete whose arrogance can edge into cruelty. Chris, in turn, dotes on Chloe, a weepy, sensitive girl who has endured a trauma that is already haunting her and her family before they move in.
Chloe’s past, her parents’ marriage and the ghost’s restricted point of view together create palpable unease that the filmmakers build on until everyone is vibrating with tension and things have gotten weird. Although there are a few haunted-house shocks, the cumulative effect is more unsettling than scary.
To a degree, the movie is an elaborate storytelling exercise for Soderbergh, but it’s one with stakes and characters who, as real feeling creeps into the movie, you grow to care for. One of the more impressive things about Soderbergh’s work here is that he — aided by a characteristically strong cast that includes the actor West Mulholland as Tyler’s friend Ryan — makes you hope everyone makes it out OK.
That includes the ghost, which may be otherworldly but turns out to be strangely relatable. Mainstream narrative movies tether you to stories with strategies and techniques that — much like the ghost here — gives you a close, privileged angle on what’s happening. It’s rare, though, for a movie to be shot exclusively or largely through a protagonist’s point of view, and few do it successfully. (A recent outlier is RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys.”) In the 1947 film noir “Lady in the Lake,” you mostly see what the protagonist sees, including parts of his body (and his reflection), which can make it seem like he has a camera instead of a head. Soderbergh’s ghost-camera, by contrast, grows progressively and touchingly human.
Ghosts have haunted cinema since the beginning, with some early viewers comparing onscreen people to apparitions. In the years since, other ghosts, including earlier filmmakers, have haunted our screens: Hitchcock looms over much of Brian De Palma’s work like a specter. For his part, Soderbergh, one of the most restlessly inventive filmmakers working today, seems haunted by all of cinema, though there’s another uncanny, well, presence, in this movie. Here as before, he both shot and cut the movie but used two pseudonyms borrowed from his life, Peter Andrews (Soderbergh’s father) and Mary Ann Bernard (his mother). It’s no wonder that “Presence” feels so personal — he’s brought his own ghosts to this party.
Presence
Rated R for violence, ghostly and otherwise. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.
