PRESENCE (2024)

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland
Runtime: 1 hr 25 mins
Rating: M18 (Sexual Scene and Coarse Language)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 20 March 2025

Synopsis: A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they're not alone. 

Movie Review:

As much as we respect Steven Soderbergh, ‘Presence’ is a film devoid of any presence.

Shot in secret in the summer of 2023, the movie follows an unidentified spirit inhabiting a two-storey suburban house that, we see in the opening scene, is sold by a flighty real estate agent (Julia Fox) to a family of four.

To what would inevitably be the disappointment of many, the spirit is pretty benign in the first half of the movie, content to watch the ins and outs of the hard-charging matriarch Rebekah (Lucy Liu), the affable father Chris (Chris Sullivan), their star-athlete son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and their sensitive daughter Chloe (Callina Liang).

Despite clocking in at under one-and-a-half hours, the plotting takes its own time to set up the dynamics within the family. There is tension between husband and wife, not only because Chris isn’t happy with how Rebekah fawns over Tyler and neglects Chloe, but also because he is troubled by Rebekah’s fraudulent practices at work. There is also tension between Tyler and Chloe, especially given his arrogance and disdain towards her. And last but not least, there is sheer unease about Chloe, because of a recent trauma that happened just before their move in and because she senses the titular presence in her house and hanging around in her room.

Over long takes and wide angles, ‘Presence’ unfolds through the eyes of the spirit, watching the domestic drama like a voyeur. Things get a little more interesting only after Tyler’s friend from school Ryan (West Mulholland) and Chloe get intimate, with the spirit revealing its anger towards Ryan and protectiveness towards Chloe. We won’t spoil the surprise just who the spirit is eventually revealed to be, but suffice to say that the neat twist at the end doesn’t excuse the lack of much tension or build-up throughout the film.

Even though it is clear that Soderbergh and his frequent writer-collaborator David Koepp have other intentions than the typical haunted house movie, it is ultimately too anti-climactic an exercise in horror; in particular, the frustration lies with how the movie could simply have been made as a low-key, intimate drama than one disguised as a horror outing and with the gimmick of being told from the point of the view of a ghost. It is never clear what that sleight of hand is meant to accomplish, and it never really achieves anything more than being a gimmick to draw a larger audience in.

To Soderbergh’s credit, he is just as adept with his actors as he has always been, and each one of the family brings his or her own unaffected performance to ground their respective characters. Even so, it is challenging to feel any real empathy towards either of them, not with the distracting camera work floating around the house and in and out of rooms; and even though it may have sounded a brilliant conceit on paper (of having the camera as an all-seeing ghost), it emphasises the fourth wall in an unnecessarily intrusive manner.

So as much as we respect Soderbergh for being as experimental as he has always been as a filmmaker, ‘Presence’ offers too little joys, payoffs and takeaways to be anything more than a failed experiment at that. We say this knowing that we are among one of the few critics who haven’t showered this latest with undulating praise, but we’d be lying if we didn’t say how much of a letdown we felt after this slight, fleeting and utterly ephemeral ghost story.

Movie Rating:

(Little more than a failed experiment, this twist on the haunted house genre told from the perspective of an unidentified spirit within the residence lacks any compelling presence)

Review by Gabriel Chong