A family moves into an old house and goes about their daily routine. Meanwhile, a lingering spirit moves about the home and drops in on conversations and watches them while they are completely unaware. When the presence makes itself known, the family struggle to find a way to deal with it.
If you get the slightest bit of nausea from moving camerawork, you’ll probably want to sit this one out as it is comprised mostly of long takes of the ghost’s POV following the characters around the house. While the camera movement is steady for the most part, some of the slow pans with the wall-eyed lenses will undoubtedly make you dizzy. Since everything is seen through the spirit’s eyes, that means that sometimes it will be on the second floor and has to rush downstairs when someone enters the house. These moments often feel like filler and quite honestly could’ve been trimmed.
I think this might’ve worked as a short, however the seams really start to show at feature length. It doesn’t help that the characters are all sketched pretty thin and the performances (aside from Chris Sullivan who works overtime carrying the movie on his back as the well-meaning, long-suffering patriarch of the family) are one-note. The twist ending is OK, but again it’s something that may have worked better in a short or as part of an anthology film.
Presence was written by David Koepp, who knows his way around ghost stories after directing the classic Stir of Echoes. Ultimately, it all feels more like an excuse for director Steven Soderbergh to futz with his tracking camera. Much as the camera searches around to find the action, the end result plays like a gimmick in search of a movie. And honestly, once you know the gimmick, there’s really nowhere for the film to go. I did like the use of the Poltergeist font in the opening credits though.
Koepp and Soderbergh also collaborated on Black Bag, which was released just a few months later.
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