When asked about the medium of film during the Q&A portion of industry juggernaut Steven Soderbergh’s new film PRESENCE, he stated, “I don’t want it to feel like single-use plastic.” Something you use or see once and then throw away forever with no lasting impact whatsoever. For PRESENCE, that will be impossible.
PRESENCE follows a severely emotionally broken family, as seen through the eyes of a strange, silent entity haunting their new home: an intense and career-focused mother (Lucy Liu), her golden child son (Eddy Maday), traumatized daughter (Callina Liang), and worn-thin husband and father (Chris Sullivan) trying to hold onto what little love may remain between any of them.
Shot in interconnecting single scenes, the entity wanders around the home, observing the family in their rawest private moments, though seemingly focused intensely on their daughter, the only one who can sense them. Locked into its invisible self, we follow helplessly through escalating tension and danger, as powerless as the entity itself to save the family from the danger building around them.
The aspect of helplessness is intensely effective, potentially even too much. Reports have come in about audience members feeling a sort of claustrophobic panic caused by the dissociative nature of the point of view given through the camera work. In one pivotal moment, you are so locked into the helpless spectator role that you almost want to beg someone in that world to do something, anything, please.
It’s a raw moment of fear that would not be possible in a more traditional fixed perspective that keeps the viewer as an omnipotent figure vs an active participant in the existence of the presence itself, and it’s understandable that several people walked out from the intensity of that, and other, moments.
On a performance level, the cast works brilliantly together. The brokenness of their family is portrayed without veering into Afternoon Special melodrama and through the intimacy and vulnerability of their quiet moments that no one but us can see, their motives make painful sense. Lucy Liu in particular ripped my heart out of my chest in the span of about thirty seconds.
Liang’s interactions with the presence through the camera do wonders for how deeply the audience learns to care for her in her pain and fear for her safety moving forward, while Sullivan’s turn as her broken father serves as the closest thing to peace and kindness in the strangely claustrophobic house. Compared to their stern and seemingly narcissistic-at-times family members, they fully pump the beating heart of PRESENCE.
People who are more used to Soderbergh’s work via films like the OCEAN’S series will likely be surprised at the comparatively experimental nature of PRESENCE, potentially even put off somewhat. You spend a lot of quiet moments during the build-up of the film wondering why you’re in this house and what about this family flashes a redder flag than the rest of their proverbial ski slope worth of them. But if you can open yourself to the strangeness and the ambiguity of it, there is a deeply soul-rending story ready there for you in that house, waiting to take your hand. Waiting for your presence to follow…
PRESENCE arrives in theaters on January 23, 2025.
Tags: 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, David Koepp, Eddy Maday, Julia Fox, Lucy Liu, Mary Ann Bernard, neon, Peter Andrews, Steven Soderbergh, Sundance 2024, Zack Ryan
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