Since returning from his announced retirement from feature filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh has been on a tear of productivity unmatched since the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system. His quickie projects might feel like slight exercises in style or storytelling, but they have never felt disposable. Soderbergh’s fluency in film grammar and commitment to craftsmanship at any scale shine through no matter the material.
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Until “Presence,” the director’s latest on-the-fly outing, these projects have also been so airtight as to feel a bit hermetically sealed. This new project, a reteaming with “Kimi” writer David Koepp, goes beyond just engaging with genre or new technology. It’s among the most personal works Soderbergh has ever made.
This is not an autobiographical work, just self-reflexive of his role in the filmmaking process. In front of the restless camera, an absorbing tale of spectral haunting and familial undoing plays out with tight precision. But how he documents this ghost story has a way of revealing the man inside the machine like rarely before.
Soderbergh has never backed down from finding freedom by embracing restrictions, and “Presence” continues his trend of dutifully adhering to an aesthetic like white on rice. The film harkens back to the primitive cinema style known as the “phantom ride.” These novelty shorts removed the camera from a place of fixed (and faux) objectivity by strapping the cameraman to the front of a moving vehicle. This survey of the landscape expanded the frame but narrowed the focus by highlighting an invisible but integral part of the image: the person behind the camera.
That same presence of absence pervades Soderbergh’s film as he brings the old-fashioned technique into the 21st century with the help of digital cameras. The camera floats in defiance of gravity as it rigorously adheres to the POV of a ghost confined within the walls of a New Jersey house. It’s an unpredictable and exciting ride to assume the line of sight for a force that cannot be seen, much less understood or known. Soderbergh is in total command and asks for nothing less than total submission from an audience to go where he wants within the space.
This commitment to voyeurism proves the real highlight of viewing “Presence.” That does not discount the compelling story that the camera eye observes. As a family moves into the dwelling also shared by the unknown apparition, it regards them with a chilly sense of disinterest. The camera gradually reveals the fault lines that a new house cannot cover. The two parents (Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan) wrap themselves in a cocoon of self-interest while their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) flails in grief to the annoyance of their son Tyler (Eddy Maday). The gaze slowly narrows on Chloe, the only person who can pick up the ghost’s presence without it causing a physical disturbance.
The appeal of the what in “Presence” quickly gets overtaken by the how. Beyond the immediate suspense fomented by the uncertainty of who these curious hovering eyes belong to, they involve viewers in the conscious construction of the film’s image-making. Every scene invites active deconstruction of its perspective, questioning why Soderbergh thinks his audience should be where they are.
As the film progresses, the decoding moves beyond just camera positioning and movement. Soderbergh understands that the real value in following a strict set of rules is breaking them to startling effect. Everything from the velocity of the presence’s movement to when he breaks continuity by smashing to black provides an opportunity for pondering.
Despite this requirement of involvement, “Presence” never feels like an effortful exertion to watch. Part of that is just Soderbergh’s lean filmmaking style—no filmmaker leaves less fat on the bone than him. At just 85 minutes, he gets in and out of the story without overstaying his welcome. But this unconventional ghost story also works as well as it does because Soderbergh is a master at disguising the work as an organic thrill ride. While he can’t help but cheat out a little bit here to show his work, it makes the film’s unsettling menace both memorable and magical. [B+]
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