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*/**** starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday written by David Koepp directed by Steven Soderbergh
by Walter Chaw The subjective camera is nothing new, of course. 1947’s Lady in the Lake is a largely failed Raymond Chandler adaptation in which Philip Marlowe is the camera, while director RaMell Ross cannily attaches the technique to a critic-proof project in the current Nickel Boys. First-person shooter (FPS) video game enthusiasts are more than familiar with the concept, and purveyors of porn know that VR-ready stereoscopic smut has its own niche market. Everything “new” is ancient, in other words, and the experience of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence at times reminded me of playing the first-person, text-based INFOCOM games of my childhood: floating in and out of scenes; picking up bits and pieces of information and trying to cohere them into an unrevealed storyline. Horror aficionados will certainly have moments of déjà vu here, what with the camera being yoked to a predatory point-of-view. (Halloween, I’m looking at you.) Which is to say that Presence definitely pulls the odd pleasure-lever in my lizard brain, not that it’s good. Funny, because even Soderbergh himself has said he never thought a “POV” film could work because you don’t get to see the reaction of the protagonist–but then he goes ahead and makes Presence anyway…and cheats.
But the problem isn’t that Presence is an elderly thing done with state-of-the-art tech. No, the problem is that it’s terrible. Call it, for argument’s sake, “The Avatar Conundrum.” A mixed-race couple, Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan), move with their teenage offspring, Carl (Lucas Papaelias) and Chloe (Callina Liang), into an unaffordable house because it’s in the right school district. Even without the key piece of information that this house is haunted by a ghost wearing “martial arts shoes,” Chloe and Chris question the wisdom of living beyond their means. “You know how she gets,” Chris says, referring to his wife. Chris is a passive-aggressive milquetoast breeding contempt in his daughter for her mother, is what I’m saying. Rebecca, meanwhile, is interested in the success of budding bully/jock asshole Carl’s prospects as a star on the swim team and what that might mean for college. She is, in the popular vernacular, a dragon mother, and it’s a terrible shame the underutilized Liu continues to only get high-profile roles if she does chop-socky or plays a hard-driving, unreasonable mama bear in the Asian mold. Imagine if the parents’ races were reversed. Imagine if Rebecca were Black or Hispanic, or disabled in some way. You would be careful, I think, to seek to understand what the casting means to the character. Or, if you were two unbelievably wealthy and powerful white men (Soderbergh and his writer, David Koepp), maybe you wouldn’t.
You may not notice or care about that. If you think a film isn’t political, after all, it’s because you agree with its politics. It’s like taking a bath in a tub that is exactly your body temperature. One of the pernicious things about bias is that it is, by its nature, invisible to you unless you try to see it. And to do that, you need to have empathy, for starters. If you think you’re tired of hearing about this, imagine how tired I am of you consenting to/condoning it without the occasional surprising burst of intuition to slow the noose from my neck. Luckily, Presence is quite bad without dragging race into it, thinking it needs to be a puzzle box with a tidy solution to a secondary intrigue that is worse than a MacGuffin in that not only does the audience not care about it, they don’t even really know about it. So, rather than replicate the moody paranormal/psychosexual (maybe incestual) tension of Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited (the picture’s ostensible inspiration), Presence ends up being a glad-handing, allegedly mass-appealing, sub-Joss Whedon, vaguely gross teen trauma thing written by a guy whose last assignment was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Presence is the product of a terrible match between creator and topic: a director who has stated his disinterest in the horror genre and his belief that POV flicks don’t work, exploring new techniques to make an object he doesn’t know and doesn’t believe in. I’m reminded of that episode of “The Simpsons” in which a lot of biological experiments are discovered and a parrot-monster squawks, “Awk, I shouldn’t be.” Presence is an experiment by our most boldly experimental mainstream filmmaker that has all the pejorative hallmarks suggested by the term “experimental” to the layman: it’s rote and careless, a toss-off in every way except the cinematography (courtesy of Soderbergh’s alter ego, Peter Andrews). Even the trick of floating through walls and ceilings is a gag common since the silent era, when affecting the illusion was much harder. I think it’s done better in David Fincher’s (Koepp-scripted) Panic Room. I also think it’s done better in 1927’s Wings, where it serves the story but isn’t the story itself. I was really excited for a Steven Soderbergh horror movie. I wish he were a fraction as excited to make it.
