11 hours Ago By Mid-day
Film: Presence Cast: Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, West Mulholland, Lucas Papaelias Director: Steven Soderbergh Rating: 2/5 Runtime: 84 min Presence is a ghost story that is told from the ghost’s perspective. Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp explore themes of grief, loss, and reasons for haunting. The film is short on length at 85 min, is darkly lit but there are no scares here and the mystery is facile at best.
A new family moves into a beautiful old home - that includes Rebekah (Lucy Liu), husband Chris (Chris Sullivan), and teenage children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). Chloe’s best friend has recently died of a drug overdose, so she’s struggling with depression and she’s the only one who can sense the spirit. The audience is privy to what the spirit sees.
The narrative is a series of single takes separated by black screen. The spirit is clued into the various tensions among the family members - tensions that turn into divisions when Chloe starts claiming to sense a ghost- not a violent one at that. The most harm it does is ransack rooms and drop a few shelves.
Chloe begins a romance with Tyler’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland) but that doesn’t help distract her thoughts. Eventually, the family brings in a psychic to read the energy in the home. The movie suggests an ongoing connection between the living and the dead because of some unfinished business that needs to be resolved before they can move on.
It’s only during the last act, that the events come to their resolution. The performances are believable ..
.if a little underplayed. Lucy Liu is unrecognizable, playing the mother without the affectations we’ve seen on television.
Callina Liang conveys Chloe’s link with the supernatural with conviction. Steven Soderbergh takes a risk telling the story this way. He himself operates the camera.
The film was supposedly shot covertly in a single house location. It doesn’t pay off completely because there’s very little happening and the dramatics are so shrouded in darkness that you tend to lose interest. Presence is not horrific or creepy and the ghost is in some sort of limbo, rather benign.
The ghost doesn’t appear on screen nor does it make any sounds, so everything is left to your imagination - and that doesn’t help either. There’s very little sense of urgency even leading up to the resolution. This movie doesn’t have any scares, is not grotesque to be denoted as a horror flick.
The ‘twist’ is also easy to catch on to pretty early in the film - so there’s nothing much here other than a failed experiment..
