The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
If you are one of those people that watches the Paranormal Activity movies and thinks “gee, I’m enjoying this, but I wish that even less was happening,” then boy do I have the movie for you. Presence is solid on a technical level, which is the film criticism equivalent of telling someone that their blind date has a great personality. Some interesting choices and a veteran director couldn’t stop me from struggling to stay awake during a movie that feels interminably longer than its scant 85-minute running time.
The plot is the standard family-moves-into-a-haunted-house shtick. The family (consisting of mother Rebecca, father Chris, brother Tyler and sister Chloe) move into a new house and Chloe begins to sense a ghostly presence in their new home. She assumes that the ghost is her dead friend Nadia, one of a couple of local girls to mysteriously die in their sleep recently. The parents’ marriage is on shaky ground and the entire family is strained, which I think is largely because the brother is a complete dick that likes to hangout with his obvious villain friend Ryan. Over time, the haunting escalates to the point that it knocks some stuff off the wall. I pissed myself in terror, honestly.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh (whose filmography is so random that choosing a few movies to list for reference is like randomly throwing darts at an IMDB list), the gimmick here is that the film is told in first-person from the perspective of the ghost. In other words, the audience is looking through the eyes of the ghost for the entire movie. A first-person perspective isn’t completely unique (I’ve seen it done before in 2015’s Hardcore Henry and 1947’s Lady in the Lake), but I haven’t seen it done in a horror film. Last year’s In a Violent Nature came close, but it still used an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective for the most part. The idea of a ghost story shot from the first-person perspective of the ghost is an intriguing one.
Purely in terms of cinematography and staging, the experiment works and is interesting from a filmmaking perspective. The movie is comprised entirely of long single-shot sequences that follows the ghost’s viewpoint throughout the house while the actors go through their dialog and stage directions around the sweeping perspective of the camera. It creates an interesting voyeuristic effect, sort of like found footage without the found footage. However, the effect wears thin pretty damn quickly as one realizes that the film is going to do very little with it.
Presence just simply isn’t a horror film. It is a family drama with some supernatural elements and the family drama isn’t even all that dramatic. The haunting never amounts to more than knocking some things off shelves and it never feels like a threat (there is a narrative reason for this, but more on that in a moment). Imagine Poltergeist if the horror reached its peak with the stacked chairs in the kitchen and you will have an idea of what to expect. I was actually nodding off during this movie and that almost never happens to me.
Alright, now I have to get into SPOILERS, so consider this a warning………
Okay, the movie ends with Tyler tackling Ryan through a window, preventing him from killing Chloe. I saw this movie with two friends and we had different interpretations of the ending. One friend and I both thought that Nadia (the daughter’s friend) was the ghost the whole movie, with Tyler (the son) only appearing as the ghost in the final scene after his death. My other friend thought that Tyler was the ghost the entire time and was manipulating events in the past to prevent his sister’s death. It turns out that this second take is the intended interpretation of the movie. So, Tyler’s ghost goes back in time and sets in motion the event that leads to his death, thus creating a time paradox. Then Tyler’s ghost is able to leave the house having done its job, except that then it wouldn’t be there to prevent the events in the past and therefore wouldn’t have become a ghost. That’s just good fucking writing. Additionally, we see the ghost’s reflection in the final scene to establish that it is Tyler, but the ghost didn’t cast a reflection in any other scene in the movie. So you have options here based on your interpretation: this is either a boring, shitty movie or a boring, shitty movie that makes no sense. It’s like a choose-your-own adventure book where every choice leads to you being beaten over the head with a mallet.
Presence has a few interesting things going on in terms of filmmaking, the performances are generally fine and maybe someone could find more value here if they are looking for a family drama instead of a horror movie. But the trailers promised me a horror movie and I sure as hell didn’t get one. I was initially going to give this an F, but I am trying to be more stingy with F grades this year after the trainwreck of moviegoing that was 2024. Hooray for lowered standards.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_(2024_film)#/media/File:Presence_film_poster.jpg
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