“Presence” is Experimental in the Best Way

IMG via NEON

There’s a famous quote from director Steven Soderbergh, a modern-day cinematic maverick if ever there was one, about the first three shots of a movie. In Soderbergh’s estimation, the first three shots of a film offer more than enough cinematic substance to determine if a film is going to be good or not. As he says, “After the first three shots, I know whether this person knows what they’re doing or they don’t.” And there is perhaps no film in the multi-hyphenate filmmaker’s vast and sprawling oeuvre that takes the principles of this theory to heart quite as much as his latest film, Presence.

Soderbergh has spent his career pushing the very boundaries of the modern cinematic form. Ever since his innovative low-budget feature film debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, from embracing digital cameras early on with Che in 2008 to shooting 2015’s Unsane on a literal iPhone, the director/cinematographer/editor has been a filmic forerunner in every sense of the word. There is no better testament to his insatiable appetite for filmmaking than the fact that, while sitting in the theater for Presence, I was shown a trailer for his next film, Black Bag, which comes out in a month and a half. The man has now directed thirty-three feature films, and that’s only directing. He also occasionally chooses to spread his wings elsewhere, like that time he opted to work as the cinematographer and editor of Magic Mike XXL and revolutionized digital film lighting, just for fun. All of that to say, Soderbergh clearly loves himself a technical, visual challenge, and Presence is the latest in a long line of fascinating visual experiments.

Presence is the story of a haunted house, told directly from the perspective of the ghost doing the haunting. Upon initially hearing this hook, I kind of assumed that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp would be taking some liberties with what exactly that meant, but I assumed very wrong. Like Hitchcock committing to the one-sustained-shot-for-the-whole-film visual discipline of Rope, Soderbergh so wholeheartedly commits to this rule that, for the entirety of the film, the camera itself is literally the point of view of the ghost.

Between every single shot, there is a buffer of black screen. On a narrative level, this is meant to signify the passage of time between one event and the next. On a formal level, it is Soderbergh taking that old three-shot rule to insane new heights. What if every shot of a movie was essentially the first shot, with no built-up momentum or movement from a previous shot to coast upon? What if a film deliberately foregrounded the very elements of the craft at play, calling the audience’s attention to the length and duration of each individual shot by emphasizing every single cut across the runtime of the entire film? That’s exactly what Presence is. This results in a film that is essentially a series of incredibly well-staged, intimate, and often invasively intrusive sustained shots that capture the familial drama unfolding within the haunted house, all from the unbroken perspective of the titular spirit.



Visually, the entire thing is filmed on a small handheld camera (the Sony A7, for those curious) with a very wide lens. While wide lenses lend a real sense of scale and scope to exterior shots or extravagant sets, putting it inside a fairly small suburban home makes everything feel claustrophobic and cacophonous. The very first shot of the film is simply of the camera making its way through the house, seemingly aimlessly. Not only does this wind up serving as a crucial story setup (it gets the audience incredibly familiar with the geography of the location, and the introduction of the mournful piano-led score by Zack Ryan midway through even plants the seeds for a lot of the more pathos-laden beats that will come in the film’s back half), but it also serves the purpose of getting the audience readily acquainted with the visual vernacular of the film and the way in which it is going to function.

While these tactics are technologically quite modern, the effect is timeless. For all of its digital artifice and distinctly handheld raucousness, the film that Presence most often visually evoked for me was Jack Clayton’s seminal haunting classic, The Innocents. That film, made back in 1961, similarly utilized near-egregiously wide lenses that stretched the frame practically to its breaking point. Even while embracing ruthlessly modern techniques, the foundations of Soderbergh’s storytelling instincts remain rooted in classical cinema, combining tradition and innovation in fascinating ways.

In every way, the film feels like an ambitious artistic experiment, energized by this youthful, independent spirit and drive. And then suddenly, Lucy Liu will show up, and you’ll remember that this is a proper Hollywood film. One of the real strengths of Soderbergh’s unconventional shooting style and visual language here is the way in which the film affords its actors such room to truly perform within its confines. In many ways, the long takes enable the film’s most dramatic confrontations to feel more like you’re sitting in the front row at an incredible stage play than in a movie theater. The entire cast is wonderful, truly rising to the challenge, with Liu, Chris Sullivan, and Callina Liang all delivering remarkably alive work. The greatest testament to both the strength of the performances and the verisimilitude of Koepp’s script is that there were numerous times throughout the film that, in spite of the genuine awe I felt at watching Soderbergh’s visual design unfold, the formal trappings of the film fell away entirely because I was so caught up in the moment-to-moment interpersonal drama of these characters in such an authentic way.

One of the things that I most love about ghost stories is that they are ultimately thematic vessels. A ghost can be a metaphor for anything and utilized in so many different ways within stories. When it comes to cinematic ghost stories specifically, I find them all the more interesting because is there really much of a difference between a ghost and someone whose image is entrapped in celluloid? Films live on well beyond us, as do the ideas and values which they hold. An actor, director, or creator of any kind may pass on, and yet we can still commune with them in one way or another by watching and engaging with their films. Presence is a film with these ideas very much at the forefront of its mind, ultimately becoming a tale untethered from time and rooted in emotionality that reverberates throughout reality altogether. But here, in many ways, Soderbergh has flipped the script. Rather than those within the film being ghosts, we, the audience, are the ghosts, unable to interact with the world around us in tangible ways, damned to an eternity of voyeurism. The film plays with these ideas and ultimately bakes them into its very climax in interesting ways.

Ultimately, I found Presence to be visually fascinating and utterly engaging, but I desperately wish its script had found a more satisfying and tonally in-line resolution. It’s a film whose story and craft engage with gargantuan themes, grappling with nothing less than the nature of existence itself, inciting existentialism in every frame. While its narrative does a great job cultivating these thoughts early on, it ultimately attempts to wrap things up in a far-too-neat and concise bow that does such ideas a tremendous disservice. For all the inescapable, palpable dread the film holds, both with regard to its overt horror and the simmering resentment brewing at the heart of the central family, the narrative’s ending is content to essentially pin the blame for all of the film’s previously inexplicable horrors on one single character.

For me, this ending dilutes the film’s power and detracts from the strength of Koepp’s boldest writing strokes. It made me wistfully think of the similarly inspired and innovative ghost-related film, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, which deals with similar thematic subjects and sticks the landing with far more fitting and tonally cohesive aplomb. Having said all of that, even amidst this relatively disappointing finale, Soderbergh does manage to turn the final shot of the film into something far more than the sum of its parts, complete with Lucy Liu making an acting choice that sent literal shivers up my spine.


RGM GRADE

(B)

Presence is a more-than-fitting addition to Soderbergh’s vast catalog of cinematic experiments, and it makes me incredibly thankful that we have filmmakers as articulate, fearless, and ambitious as he is.

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