In This Horror Movie, You Can Look, But Not Touch

The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring from filmmaking in 2013. By 2017, he had returned to work, releasing the delightful heist caper Logan Lucky, and in the years since, new Soderbergh films have become as seemingly inevitable as death or taxes. The director has made nine films in the past eight years, encompassing satirical comedies (The Laundromat, High Flying Bird), crime thrillers (No Sudden Move, Kimi), and strange society spoofs (Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Let Them All Talk). What they tend to have in common is the sense that the director made them on a whim: not sloppily, but airily, with Soderbergh always looking for an intriguing way to flesh out a basic tale.

“Airy but intriguing” is the best way to describe his newest film, Presence, too. It’s a haunted-house movie that avoids most of the genre’s  obvious tropes. But Soderbergh’s rapid pace of production (usually by involving small casts and featuring limited plotlines, or sometimes shooting on iPhones) has become both an advantage and a hindrance—it enables him to tell such a wide swath of stories, but all of them feel novella-size. Presence, like much of the director’s recent work, is less an entrée than a charming apéritif, albeit with a couple of smart twists worth ruminating on.

The film is deceptively straightforward: A family of four moves into a new home, and each member wrestles with some personal demon while also encountering whatever’s haunting the place. The clever conceit? We see the events from the perspective of the ghost—or whatever it is that’s watching everybody. Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp—a fellow Hollywood mainstay—don’t tip their hands much about what, exactly, is going on until the film’s final moments. The fixed perspective makes Soderbergh’s camera a character of its own; it spies and swivels around every room, offering a clear perspective but keeping the being’s motivations unknown. It’s a simple visual notion, and yet somewhat unlike anything I’d ever seen before on the big screen.

[Read: The films Steven Soderbergh watches on a loop]

Presence begins in an empty suburban home, the ghost peeking in on the real-estate agent Cece (played by Julia Fox) as she shows an interested family around; soon enough, they’re unpacking boxes, though they all seem out of sorts. There’s the tightly wound mom, Rebekah (Lucy Liu); the depressed dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan), who’s distracted by some unspecified transgression in his past; and two teenage kids: Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), both of whom are mourning the recent, tragic loss of a friend. Information comes in dribs and drabs, because the viewers’ sole means of receiving it are through the eyes of this mysterious force. At first, the specter is primarily a static viewer, but eventually, it begins to zip through the house—as does the camera. But only occasionally does the being intentionally provoke a reaction from the tenants it’s peeping on, such as rumbling a table to startle someone; otherwise, it continues to lurk in the corners.

Watching the cinematic action through the eyes of a monster has obviously been done before in movies. The point-of-view shot is usually kept to a bravura scene or two—such as the famous opening sequence of Halloween, and some of the director Brian De Palma’s memorable set pieces. The unseen “star” of Presence, however, is much more low-key than what’s shown in those slasher-film bits of flamboyance; at first, it seems almost afraid to show off any weird poltergeist powers before inching toward what’s happening around it. But the ghost eventually comes to intervene in the family’s life in odd ways and reveals, little by little, why it’s cooped up in the house.

The actual plotting is perfunctory stuff, though Koepp reliably communicates the character dynamics with a few crucial lines of dialogue. Rebekah can’t figure out how to console Chloe; Chloe, in turn, is drawn to one of Tyler’s friends, a classic bad boy named Ryan (West Mulholland)—the kind of romantic mistake many a teen might make, but with a slightly sinister edge. If the story played out more conventionally, it’d probably come off as pretty dull. But the magic of Presence is its feeling of constraint. Viewers can still see everything that’s going on from the first-person angle, allowing them to spot the warning signs that this family might disintegrate into further misery. Locking the audience into the perspective of a noncorporeal form is brilliantly limiting; ghosts are voyeurs, and as unsettling as it is to spy on this family, the far creepier feeling is that of being unable to do anything but watch. Soderbergh uses the barrier of the screen as part of the film’s story—as if to say we can look, but we can’t touch.

[Read: Steven Soderbergh’s ‘crackpot theories’ on how moviegoing has changed]

Although this is all psychologically disconcerting, Presence is hardly a traditional work of horror. There are no big jump scares, the atmosphere is deliberately mundane, and the mood is more melancholic than terrifying. The film is, essentially, a domestic drama with a spooky metatextual twist. And as much as I’m enjoying Soderbergh’s postretirement era—defined by rapid-fire, slender movies—I do sometimes find myself longing for a full meal. Presence runs just 85 minutes long, but it’s a sharp jab to the ribs with a punchy, effective ending. I wonder what Soderbergh might be able to produce if he were willing to slow down and focus on what’s in front of him, instead of always itching to move onto his next experiment.