“Presence” is a rare movie told entirely in the first person, and a unique one in that the camera represents the perspective of a spirit. At first we don’t know what kind of spirit. As the story unfolds, we get pieces of new information. Eventually, all is revealed.
The main character is the presence itself. We meet it in the first scene as roams through an empty house, studying people as they enter the space. A real estate agent (Julia Fox) arrives to show the property to the Paynes, the family that ends up moving into it. The mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is some sort of hard-driving executive type: very goal-oriented, self-centered, and not sensitive to other people’s feelings. Her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) is a big man with broad shoulders but a gentle demeanor. Their teenage son Tyler (Eddy Madday) is energetic and arrogant and lacks empathy; he seems to have been cut from the same cloth as the mom and might be on track to become a Master of the Universe-type. There’s also a teenage daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), whose middle name is Blue. She’s still in a fog of grief because her best friend recently died.
Chloe is the first person to note the existence of the spirit. She looks directly at it—i.e., right into the camera—very matter-of-factly in the opening scene. She later explains that she doesn’t so much see dead people, like the kid in “The Sixth Sense,” as sense them when they’re close. She’s gifted that way. But the gift was never previously identified, much less developed, so she can’t explain it to others and manifests it only occasionally. The other family members resist or reject the idea that there’s something else in the house with them but accept it after things start flying off shelves. Outsiders visit the house, including the head of a team of painters (Daniel Danielson), a medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres), and Tyler’s new best friend Ryan (West Mulholland), a confident, smooth-talking, popular kid who takes a fancy to Chloe and ends up her boyfriend. All have varying types of contact with the presence, which seems to be struggling to make sense of its own existence and its role in the family drama.
“Presence” has overt symbolic touches, like naming the pained central family the Paynes and giving the depressed teenage girl the middle name Blue (a word that can also indicate a state of grace in Catholicism, or a general air of wisdom). Chris even complains at one point about having a name that’s an allusion to Jesus. But these aren’t so much clues as bits of narrative spice. And although “Presence” is a kind of mystery—the central question being “What is the nature of the presence, and what relationship if any does it have to the family and/or the house?”—it’s not a puzzle movie that will be “solved” on a Reddit board and then forgotten about, like an achievement level unlocked on a video game.
Additional pieces of information keep changing your take on what’s happening in the story and in the minds and hearts of the living characters (and the central dead one). There is a sense in which the presence is on a journey of psychological self-discovery—not like a ghost in “The Sixth Sense” that doesn’t know it’s dead, but a living person struggling through emotional challenges and moral tests until a clear self-image emerges.
“Presence” doesn’t develop all of its threads equally well—in particular, the stuff involving Chris and Rebecca’s declining marriage and the seemingly immoral nature of Rebecca’s business dealings gets a more glancing treatment than one might have wished for, and sometimes it feels like some connective tissue might’ve gotten cut in the name of pacing?—but the totality feels like a complete, very solid statement, one that earnestly believes that people are the sum total of their choices and actions and can bear a penalty in the afterlife for going down bad roads.
“Presence” is written by David Koepp—who writes a lot of Steven Spielberg films and other blockbusters and is himself a director of other movies with ghosts in them—and is directed, shot, and edited by Steven Soderbergh. As is nearly always the case on his productions, Soderbergh operates the camera himself. In this one he should be considered a performer as well as a filmmaker. He is physically involved in every scene, representing the point-of-view of the spirit, and doing things and looking at things in a plot-driven, character-motivated way, performing alongside (and occasionally interacting with) the rest of the cast. An entire book could be written about the camerawork, which reveals plot information but does it “in character,” in a way that will likely deepen the film upon repeat viewings, once the central questions have been answered and only the exposed narrative architecture remains.
The totality of the movie is hard to describe without giving away every significant detail of the story, so parts of this review will necessarily be vague. Suffice to say that in the end, “Presence” is less of a horror movie or even a traditional ghost story than a drama about personal morality, responsibility, self-inquiry, and personal evolution, told from the perspective of someone who’s not alive anymore. If that doesn’t make sense now, it will after you’ve seen the movie.
