There's a ghost in my house: "Presence"

One definition of irony: watching a film called Presence in a cinema where you are the only living soul. Two weekends into its run, and clearly Steven Soderbergh's latest experiment hasn't set the box office alight, as Soderbergh's previous experiments - take your pick: 1996's Schizopolis, 2002's Full Frontal, 2005's Bubble, 2009's The Girlfriend Experience - rarely have. A quirk of the UK release schedule, however, ensures this end-of-January title functions as a critique of, or at the very least offers an instructive contrast to, a notable start-of-January title, namely RaMell Ross's Nickel Boys. In Soderbergh's film, a subjective camera both sees and registers what's really going on - and, indeed, the whole movie hinges on this, that camera being the organising principle of a commercially minded horror pic rather than a tastefully circumspect literary adaptation. As you'll doubtless have already heard, the camera in Presence corresponds to the perspective of a ghost, afforded free rein to meander, sometimes scuttle up and down the staircases of a well-appointed three-bedroom abode in a leafy small town. Of the family moving in, mom and pop (Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan) are too busy paying the bills to notice, while jockish son Tyler (Eddy Maday) proves far more concerned with shoring up his status among his peers. Yet the latter's sister Chloe (Callina Liang) - much like Christina Ricci in the Casper movie, mired in grief - will often spot the interloper in this household's midst, and dare to look at the camera (and, by extension, us) directly. Occasionally, the ghost intervenes in these characters' lives, rearranging the contents of these rooms in ways both minor (setting a book back on a shelf) and major (causing powerouts); mostly, it hovers, floats, drifts, a mutely all-seeing eye, deprived even of the usual spectral "ooo"s.

What's odd about the indifferent public response is that this is hardly the kind of avant-garde technique that has scared off the mass audience in the past; easily understood within minutes of the opening credits, the erstwhile-person perspective is no more radical a break with horror continuity than, say, the night-vision and surveillance-cam footage out of which the Paranormal Activity movies, big multiplex hits in their day, were constructed. I just wonder whether the trailers gave off an alienating whiff of Covid-era limitation: a finite cast in a location we never leave, a camera obliged for narrative reasons to maintain some distance. (Bubble might have been an apt alternative title, had Soderbergh not already gone there.) The upside of this approach is a certain directness and simplification. The script, by the stalwart David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Stir of Echoes), relies on troubled human beings speaking their truths within earshot of the lens; the project allows Soderbergh to work close-up with his actors, even as he delivers the sort of saleable concept execs get excited by nowadays. Better still for the suits: this concept doesn't have to resort to expensive CGI to provide a stand-in spook. (One reason this experiment may have been greenlit: it presumably didn't cost all that much.) The downside would be a lack of outright fireworks. Substituting blackouts for those jumpscares that tend to generate buzzy word-of-mouth, Presence is ultimately no more exhilarating than a fly-on-the-wall ghost story suggests. It retains a spare elegance - Soderbergh has always known how to move a camera in thoughtful, interesting ways - but has had the misfortune to drop at the moment of a maximalist Nosferatu, when audiences are evidently wanting more from their horror movies to step out in the cold. 

Presence is now showing in cinemas nationwide.