Presence (2024 | USA | Steven Soderbergh | 85 minutes)
In a series of single cooped-up takes Steven Soderbergh gives us a ghost’s eye view of a family slowly coming undone.
Shot entirely in handheld camerawork from the spirit’s presence, we open with an empty house whose bare rooms are traversed slowly by an unseen vantage. Soon, through long takes the cut to black, we observe as a new group of people hastily snap it off the real estate market and make it their home.
We see as a mother (Lucy Liu) chooses the address to satisfy her obsession with her son’s (Eddy Maday) success: it’s in a great school district with a strong swim team where she expects him to thrive. It’s clear that she’s the main breadwinner, chief decision-maker, and that he’s her primary concern, that is, when she’s not quietly consumed by avoiding being swept up in a burgeoning work scandal that might be of her own making. The softer, quieter, more accommodating father (Chris Sullivan) constantly tries to make space for his withdrawn daughter (Callina Laing) who’s still shaken by the traumatic death of her best friend.
In the quiet gaze of this spectre, the family makes the house a home and the various plot simmer to eventually reveals themselves. The teenage kids can be brats to each other, the spouses have tensions below the surface. Each occasionally boil over, like any typical family. A hot new kid from school enters the picture, an avenue to cruel social climbing for the son and a manipulatively disarming romantic figure for the daughter. Soderberg’s use of the single setting, exceptionally realistically appointed house, and naturalistic lighting design invite our curiosity.
As the full scope of the story unfolds — and the unnamed presence whose vantage we’ve been sharing makes itself known — there are surprising jolts if not jump scares. Everything you need to know is masterfully revealed if you’re paying attention as the camera glides, dodges, and hides (the work is all Soderbergh, apparently in martial arts slippers). With a script from David Koepp, who penned the similarly cooped-up KIMI, the film stakes itself as yet another piece of exceptional filmmaking and brilliantly compelling structure from a chameleonic master of genre-hopping.
Easily my favorite of the festival, with a recontextualizing conclusion that sparks discussion and repeat viewings. When the end arrives, it comes swiftly, with timely relevance, unsettling force, and haunting power.
Presence played an official selection of the Premieres Program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival; it was subsequently acquired by NEON for theatrical release.
Image courtesy Sundance Institute.