Presence

Contains spoilers for Presence, a film that I think is most effective the least the viewer knows about it beforehand.

I’ve always been a fan of haunted house stories. I like all the ways in which the conventions of the genre can be taken apart and reassembled into new forms. Presence, marketed as a horror film, spends a lot of its runtime camouflaging its true identity: it’s not really a horror film because there’s a haunted house and a ghost, it’s a horror film because it has a serial killer in it. The horror is not in the haunting, which for most of the film has a gentle touch – it’s a feeling of wrongness and unease as the pieces of the puzzles fall together and the real story emerges.
The gentleness is what floored me, because it is there from the beginning but not really comprehensible in its full tragic reality until the end. The film begins in an empty house, introducing how Soderbergh will spend the entire film: both behind the camera and directing, from the point of view of the “presence” that wanders the empty halls, looks through windows but unable to go beyond the confines of the outside walls. A realtor and a family enter, and with them all the dynamics of the family, seen from the outside, like an enigma that must be decoded. They are strangers but in watching them interact, they will reveal themselves to us. The mother (Lucy Liu) isn’t interested in the house itself, only in its location, within a prestigious school district that will allow her son (Eddy Maday) to swim competitively in a highly rated programme. The daughter (Callina Liang) catches the eerie details of the house, like an old silver-nitrate backed mirror. The son is on the phone with a friend, a bit too loud, a bit too braggy. The dad (Chris Sullivan) tries to hold it all together. Something traumatic has occurred prior to the move that has affected the daughter. Maybe it’s too early for the great change, or maybe it’s just what she needs. They buy the house; they do some minor renovations. One of the painters refuses to enter a room, and a conversation hints that this has been an ongoing problem, for now unnamed. We watch bits and pieces, snatch pieces of conversation, try to make sense of them. Then the family moves in.

It's difficult to convey in words that the way the presence moves through the house, the way the camera does, communicates emotions. It’s a gaze imbued with meaning. It observes, it follows, it seems to try to understand. In retrospect, the first two moments in which it touches – always inanimate objects, as it seems to be unable to interact with anything currently held by a human – are deeply emotional. While Chloe, the daughter, takes a shower in her walk-in, it picks up school books from her bed and puts them on her desk, as if to remind her to take a break, or to take a chore off her shoulders. It tidies after her in a specific way that feels deeply familiar and caring, profoundly gentle. When she realises, she is scared, but it’s only one of many moments where she knows that there is something else in the house with them before anyone else does. In a later moment, the son, Tyler, retells a story of cruelty against a female classmate without seeing that his lack of empathy is glaringly obvious – and the presence moves furiously up the stairs to wreck his room (the only moment in the film where the presence acts violently), focusing on his trophies, as if intending to destroy all these signifiers of his vanity and selfishness. At this point, Chloe is convinced that the presence is her friend who passed away before the move, looking over her – but it’s only with the realisation in the end, when we know the true identity of the ghost, that this moment of anger receives the more meaningful interpretation of the presence’s shame and regret.  

There is also a sense here that the people the presence observes are frequently captured in important emotional moments – discussions between the father and the mother about their daughter, who is struggling with the loss of her friend, hints of some kind of white-collar crime the mum committed (and justifies, in a disturbingly frank and drunken conversation with her son, as being right because it was done for him, as if putting the emotional weight of her crime on him proves her love), the dad considering a separation for legal reasons, a breakdown into tears outside on the patio that the presence watches through the windowpane, incapable of crossing the threshold. And yet, in spite of this witnessing, the full story never emerges because it’s a one-sided observation, and it can never capture the whole thing. Maybe that sense is a combination of the limitations of the presence and the divisions within the family – especially the mother, who is so open about her favouritism for her son and her annoyance at her daughter. It comes into full view whenever the dad voices his frustrations at their lack of care and closeness, like in a foreshadowing conversation he has with his son in which he tells him that he knows that there is a better man inside of him, that it “wouldn’t kill him to stand up for his sister” for once (it’s almost as if Soderbergh relishes the irony of this – after his son’s death, he must replay that sentence in his head again and again).

Story-telling wise, it’s interesting that there are two narrative threads that unfold, each with the potential from drama, but one of which turns out to be a misdirection, just another random thing that occurs at the same time. The white-collar crime story is never fully told, it’s more of a backdrop that explains why the parents may be distracted enough from what is going on in their children’s life to realise in time that danger is lurking. The trauma of having lost a friend, and having known another girl who died under similar circumstances, is the actual key to the events. It’s not only the explanation for Chloe’s emotionally vulnerable state – her mother’s frustration at medications not working or the trouble of finding a new therapist for her – but also reveals itself to be the true horror of this horror film. Tyler befriends the most popular guy at his new school, Ryan (West Mulholland), who seems to be popular for his attractiveness and the fact that he provides drugs across the district and beyond. Chloe begins a relationship with him that looks to be based on empathy – he is the only one asking questions about her feelings, about how she feels after the loss of her friend. It seems to be a genuine emotional relationship, a moment of true connection outside the distance of her mother, the presence of a brother who teases and annoys her, the inability of her dad to say the right thing, as much as he tries (Chris is very much a good dad, but overwhelmed and unsupported). But then it turns intensely creepy and concerning – the presence intervenes when Ryan tries to drug her drink – and it all comes to a head when the parents leave town and leave the two teenagers to their own devices. Ryan drugs Tyler, and then Chloe, and brings out the Seran wrap, revealing that he’s responsible for the deaths of her friend and other girls – he’s a serial killer obsessed with controlling girls and watching them die. The time loop closes when the presence manages to wake Tyler, who runs upstairs and tackles Ryan through the window. They both die – the family moves out, and the mother catches a glimpse of her son in the mirror, revealing that the presence was him, the whole time, dislocated in time the way that the medium that came to the house earlier explained, with unfinished business and disoriented as to his identity and purpose, but now finally able to leave that he's saved his sister.

I had watched Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone a few days before Presence, which feels like an odd kind of coincidence now. There is a similar twist to the haunted house narrative there, where the ghosts of the kids that a serial killer has murdered previously do everything in their power to help his current victim escape. And then there’s Nickel Boys, with its POV camera that is so effective at conveying the horrors of institutional racism and violence at a reform school in the Jim Crow South, and even more effective by juxtaposing that violence against the gentleness of care that the protagonist receives from his friend and his grandmother. The Jonas Mekas-like scenes from his childhood have the same sense of gentleness that the presence’s care for his sister conveys – Tyler is unstuck in time and unsure of who he is anymore but the love has remained.  


2024, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Callina Liang, Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, Julia Fox, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Lucas Papaelias.