Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Spooks Sundance With Traumatic Ghost Story

Premiering at Sundance, the director’s haunted house thriller is both an experiment in first-person filmmaking and a reminder that every family is fucked up

You know the Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way?” The quartet at the center of Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence has refined their own particular brand of dysfunction to perfection. The mom, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), is a first-class control freak, has become involved in some shady financial dealings, and dotes on her teenage son, Tyler (Eddy Maday), in a way that would make Freud’s head explode. He’s a champion swimmer, and she has her hopes pinned on him breast-stroking his way to the top; the kid is also a bully. His younger sister, Chloe (Callina Liang), is grieving over the recent loss of her best friend from a mysterious drug overdose, though her brother will tell you she’s always been a head case. And then there’s their dad, Chris (This Is Us‘ Chris Sullivan), who’s worried about his daughter, fed up with his wife, and wants to punch his asshole son through a brick wall.

They’ve decided to buy a house — well, Rebecca decided they were going to buy this particular house, period, full stop — in suburban New Jersey. As their real estate agent (Julia Fox, at her most restrained) will happily tell you, it’s a roomy two-story residence with an expansive kitchen, a lovely backyard deck, and a 100-year-old mirror in the living room. What she and the family are unaware of, however, is that the house also comes with a recently acquired spirit.

How it got there is unknown. Why it’s there will eventually be revealed. Only Chloe sense its [clears throat] presence, at least until things start getting violently thrown around. But we know it’s there from the first frame, because the entirety of the film takes place from the viewpoint of this specter, roaming the hallways and gliding down staircases, lurking in closets and eavesdropping on conversations. Soderbergh has always been a restless formalist. Now he’s made the very first first-person ghost story.

Presence is also a murder mystery — it turns out that Chloe’s friend wasn’t the only person to perish from an “overdose” — as well as an elaborate PSA about paying more attention to your kids, being fully present in times of need, and never ever trusting a bro with floppy bangs. But more than anything, it’s a family therapy session filtered through a horror movie in a way that practically makes the spooky bits superfluous. The haunted-house aspect is almost a red herring. Soderbergh has never met a genre he didn’t want to deconstruct, taffy-pull or ransack for some sort of aesthetic experiment; he’s one of the few filmmakers you could imagine wearing a lab coat when he directs. And while the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

And while the dizzying, dazzling cinematography, self-shot under his usual D.P. pseudonym Peter Andrews, demands you pay attention to the technical virtuosity, that gambit (or gimmick — your call) is merely setting the table for something else.

Which brings us back to that Tolstoy quote. At the post-screening Q&A after Presence‘s Sundance premiere late Friday night, Soderbergh admitted that he’d never been a fan of virtual reality as a storytelling tool, and that part of the thrill of making this paranormal thriller was breaking his own rule about POV parameters. People don’t want to see nothing but a first-person perspective outside of video games — they need a reverse angle in order to bond with a character. Try to do a reaction shot of a ghost, however, and you see nothing. “The only way to do it was to never turn around,” he said. “There was no other plan. You live or die by that.” (Some viewers apparently found this approach too intense to handle.)

The more revealing statement, though, came from screenwriting legend David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room, War of the Worlds, Carlito’s Way — not to mention Soderbergh’s own underrated Kimi). When Soderbergh asked him to come up with a script for a haunted house movie, he mentioned that it would be told from the perspective of what may or may not be a malevolent spirit, and the focus would be “a really fucked-up family.”

Forget, for a second, how you’re able to essentially snoop on the arguments between Rebecca and Christian, or listen in on Dad offering endless sympathy for his traumatized daughter, or be a fly on the wall for Chloe getting it on with her brother’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland). Pay attention to what you’re hearing via this ghostly presence. Every marriage is a negotiated set of compromises and agreements over control, but this particular union is way past the detente stage. The acrimony is palpable. Rebecca’s neglect of her daughter and obsessive love for her son borders on pathology, and even Tyler finds it disturbing. Chloe was having issues before tragedy struck — and we should mention that Liang’s extraordinary performance is what anchors everything — and now she toggles between freaked out and numbed out. Tyler berates his sister in a way that goes beyond sibling rivalry or ribbing. The cruelty is the point with him. There are more issues on display here than at newsstands. Soderbergh could have called the film Contempt if that title hadn’t been taken.

Presence is really a ghost story in which the main ghost isn’t an ethereal apparition but the M.I.A. bonds between parents and children, husband and wife, and the members of a family as a whole. Soderbergh and Koepp may borrow the concept of a possessed place of residence in the name of goosing viewers and positing grand what-ifs in terms of presentation. The scariest thing in this film, however, is not a haunted house but a house filled with genuine hatred for your loved ones.