By Arthur Wills, Fourth Year Liberal Arts
In 1989, the Palme d’Or was awarded to a young lab-school graduate (U-High) and hot Grammy recipient (‘Best Music Video, Long Form’) for a film nowhere near as modest as its lowercase poster font styling would have you believe. At a record-breaking 26 years of age, Steven Soderbergh, along with his feature-length debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, set a precedent in Cannes, not only for emerging auteur talent but for the recognition of indie cinema amongst the big distributors. And although his subsequent filmography indicates his comfortable Hollywood success, Soderbergh’s taste for cinematic experimentation remained intact. Between several severe genre shifts and crew duties out of the director’s seat, it was confirmed that this was a man capable of anything, and restlessly so. His supposed hiatus from filmmaking announced in 2013 was doomed to last 4 short years before total relapse, in fact fostering a healthy flick-per year release schedule since, with no signs of slowing. This modern tale of triumph only serves to tragically emphasise the failure of Steven Soderbergh’s most recent offering.
Presence is the story of a family falling apart, not at the hands of supernatural forces or real grief, but of terrifyingly bad exposition. From the moment Julia Fox opens the front door to them, as the estate agent of a gorgeous suburban house in New Jersey, it is clear that all information is to be delivered with the same level of subtlety as brat summer. Each member of the Payne quartet is endowed with the flimsiest of ‘development’: Rebecca is the familial villain because she sycophantically obsesses over her son Tyler; Tyler is an arrogant cardboard cut-out of a swimming medallist; Chris is a typical step-dad, unable to navigate parental boundaries except a special quasi-religious threshold he occupies with neglected daughter Chloe; and Chloe, perhaps the most sympathetic of all, is denied distance from confrontation of the conveniently vague deaths of two of her friends. These pseudo-circumstances make for a reveal of Chloe’s sixth sense that reads too much as a heavy-handed stage direction to have any ethereal impact.
Though the initial scene, which precedes this viewing and is the first of multiple long swooping shots comprising Presence, does set up an elegant spirit realm. Helmed by a virtuosic steady-cam-man POV, ‘we’ (apparently the pronoun applied in the blocking of the titular Presence’s stage directions) glide gracefully across the upper floor of the empty property, and the distinct lack of human intervention in a timber-built neighbourhood brings to mind the meditative magic of the early A24 thriller flagship A Ghost Story. However, where David Lowery lingers on a scene – static like the fixed-placed haunting played out by Casey Affleck – Soderbergh’s vision flies with intrigue towards a window, then zooms out again, both movements gentle as the tread of something otherworldly. An innovative aesthetic sensibility, also reminiscent of the iPhone-exclusive antics of 2018’s Unsane, would lead one to wonder whether every cent of the already slim $2 million budget went straight into the cinematography. Then A-list celebrity Lucy Liu, her character having freshly experienced an unearthly tremor, will say a line like “Well, that just happened” and the audience is dreadfully reminded that many well-paid people were responsible for making that excruciating moment a reality. Worse still, we might end up longing for that innocent kind of cringe rather than the harmful variant spread by upcomer West Mulholland’s performance as Ryan: unsurprisingly, the film’s ‘super-thin’ attempt to introduce of a discussion about America’s mentally ill young men feels completely unearned.
In a script penned by the award-winning David Koepp, protagonists and antagonists alike speak as though ChatGPT produced their personalities together based on a one-page prompt. Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible may hardly be masterpieces of dialogue but the textual handling of action at least provides reason for further employment of no less than the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time. If not for dropping the clunkiest of plot points, the equaled number of non-sequiturs would only be excusable in a hyper-expensive porn production. Granted, teenagers can behave very weirdly but even the incels don’t talk like this. Not to mention the visiting spirit medium, whose ventriloquised partner comments on her behalf about trauma as a ‘metaphysical door flung open’ as cheaply as non-triggering subject matter would otherwise be brought up.
Opening in multiplexes across the US and UK not even a fortnight following the passing of David Lynch – the beloved, singular oddball who championed ambiguity at every turn of his glittering career – one would imagine the audience capacity for recognition of the ‘open-ended ending’ was at an all time high. But again, the overly-slender runtime of Presence causes us to assume a conclusion was unreached out of sheer laziness. Either that or 85 minutes is just merciful enough so as not to loom too large over anyone’s blessed evening.
Within the space of the screening, fellow moviegoers can enjoy the collective memory of synchronised groaning and eye-rolling, but somehow Presence appears to have possessed the press with unwavering praise. Even though the majority of online opinions fluctuate demographically between the professional and amateur reviewer (disappointingly positive and negative to a hilarious degree, respectively), one unanimous criticism of the film is its mismarketing. To call it a ‘horror’ as NEON Pictures did is admittedly short-sighted - yet to call it anything else is to undermine true craftspeople of whatever other genre. The 2024 TIFF and Sundance festival favourite is neither psychological nor thrilling, but an anonymous Letterboxd comment – so readily-recycled that a search for its origin is about as futile as Presence’s own efforts to generate an air of ‘mystery’ – is generally correct, and reads roughly: “This just proves that there’s nothing scarier than a boy mom”. Here’s to hoping Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp rebound with this year’s swift turnaround Black Bag and that they aren’t haunted by its predecessor for the rest of the decade.
What did you think of Presence?
