Presence

From the first moments of Steven Soderbergh's latest, we can see his love for shooting experimental little nothing movies in a gimmicky manner with prosumer gear and wide-angle lenses has unfortunately not dissipated. But none of the slip-shod features this director has made since his "retirement" could have prepared me for such a waste of time as his latest. Presence is ostensibly a haunted house picture told from the ghost's POV. Think David Lowery's A Ghost Story if it were shot by an excited film student running around with a new camera. Nothing about the way Soderbergh depicts the perspective of his unseen title character even attempts to explore what being a ghost might be like, how a ghostly presence would perceive events, or how being trapped between worlds might feel. Even with all the technology available to filmmakers of every level these days, no effort is made to make this ghost POV look like anything other than what it is—a guy with a camera moving around in rooms filming his actors while they play poorly conceived scenes of domestic drama.

It's silly to say that what we see is not what a ghost's POV would really look like, but... What we see is NOT what a ghost's POV would really look like! It's not what a living human's POV would look like either, and it sure as hell isn't the way to film a compelling family drama, which is what Presence strives to be. Like nearly all movies that attempt to convey first-person perspective with a camera, its POV looks like what a camera can record, moving through rooms the way a camera moves through rooms and looking back and forth between people in a space the way a camera does. Even though the digital camera used here doesn't have any lag or the rolling shutter distortion normally visible when cameras pan back and forth quickly, it does not mimic what a person with a head and eyes turning from one thing to another looks like, let alone what a noncorporeal presence might experience.

It's amazing that just a few months after RaMell Ross came as close as any filmmaker yet has to achieving something sublime from this oft-attempted gimmick in Nickel Boys, the formally innovative Soderbergh would be such a Johney-come-lately. But this is not uncommon for the once cutting-edge director. His recent output has often seemed like weak copies of other filmmakers' ingenuity. Three years after Sean Baker shot the excellent Tangerine on an iPhone and made it look incredible, Soderbergh shot Unsane on an iPhone and made it look... like a movie shot on an iPhone. Let Them All Talk was Soderbergh's late-to-the-party indulgence in the "let's toss out the script and let the cast improv" aesthetic that has resulted in some of the most contrived film and TV of the last two decades. And most of his recent features, including High Flying Bird and No Sudden Move, play like they're more interested in streamlining the work of the filmmakers at the expense of everything else. Soderbergh's obsession with and reliance on extreme wide-angle lenses epitomized this, as if he just decided to shoot everything with distorted near-fisheyes so as to avoid all the pesky framing and focusing normally required to make a film look competent. Still, Presence is a new low for this director.

The picture begins with the ghost hanging out in the bedroom closet of an unfurnished house, which is soon occupied by a family of Mom, Dad, teenage son, and teenage daughter. We don't yet know if the titular presence once lived in this house when it was alive, but it now resides (is trapped?) there because of events that will occur in the future. This would imply a kind of non-linear, out-of-time existence for the spirit, except that nothing about the movie unfolds that way. No attempt is made to explore how the spirit's consciousness works. The movie has many elliptical cuts that propel the story forward in chronological time as if the ghost is always sleeping unless there is some expository information that needs to be conveyed or a narrative beat that needs to occur. But there's no motivation I can detect for when the ghost comes alive. Perhaps it is drawn to conflict, as it seems to rush into rooms whenever it hears raised voices, but just as often, it rushes into rooms when people are just sitting there. The ghost simply turns on and off like, say... oh, I don't know - a camera.

Since zero attempt is made to examine the titular character as a character, the distinctive POV is simply a delivery system for the story with a big reveal at the end. But, hoo boy, what a half-assed story. And, while the film's final moment is a clever surprise, it's the type of twist that may answer one big question but doesn't magically fill in all the holes in this movie. Screenwriter David Koepp (Bad Influence, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, Spider-Man) crafts a banal surface-level drama of a family in conflict after the daughter has suffered the trauma of losing two friends to fentanyl overdoses. However, that story is given short shrift since all the attention is on the "unique" storytelling approach rather than the story. The actors are left hung out to dry with underdeveloped characters, dialogue that feels generated at a bad improv class, and no coverage or ability to fine-tune the performances through editing within the individual scenes—I mean, that would spoil the gimmick! Everyone gives an embarrassingly bad performance in this movie, with the exception of Callina Liang, the ostensible main character, Chloe, in whom the presence is most interested. Liang does well enough to stand out as the one good aspect of this mess, so it should serve her career well. The other actors, Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Lucas Papaelias, and Julia Fox, are ill-served by participating in such a half-baked production.

Soderbergh and Koepp's prior collaboration, the COVID-era thriller Kimi, may have been slight and forgettable, but it seemed to signal that the great director of sex, lies, and videotape..., Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Contagion might be coming out of the board-with-movies phase he's been in ever since flirting with retirement but immediately jumping into a host of projects for TV, stage, the internet, various publications, and a book that's still in the works. Soderbergh's hodgepodge of experimental feature films made over the past decade+ ranges from the delightfully exuberant independently distributed heist comedy Logan Lucky, which put a fresh spin on a well-worn genre, to the disgracefully sloppy straight-to-streaming The Laundromat, which attempted to illuminate the vitally important real-life Panama Papers scandal by making a movie that treated the audience like such idiots it made Don't Look Up look like All The President's Men. Presence touches on some significant cultural concerns but in the shallowest, most opportunistic ways, treating serious issues as convenient fodder. The movie is a visual conceit that went searching for a story, not a story that inspired an innovative approach to the telling.