Presence review – Steven Soderbergh’s intriguing ghost story experiment – The Guardian

For nearly all of film-makers, the restrictions insisted by Covid turned a stifling drive and created a transparent dividing line between those that may flourish in extraordinarily prohibitive circumstances and those that couldn’t. Steven Soderbergh, a director who has by no means allowed something – from Oscar glory to blockbuster success – to kill his plucky spirit of invention, made one of many solely important pandemic films with the maddeningly underseen thriller Kimi, a smooth and canny new-tech improve of a paranoid 70s thriller. He discovered a approach, together with the screenwriter David Koepp, to maximise limitations and the 2 have well reunited for a undertaking that carries on-paper similarities.

Presence, a undertaking shrouded in trademark thriller, shot over final summer time with a waiver and now unveiling at Sundance, is one other one-location style train, playfully riffing on age-old tropes and permitting Soderbergh, as each director and cinematographer, the chance to experiment. This time he’s taking part in with the conventions of haunted home horror, his movie advised from the angle of the ghost located in a just lately renovated home, new inhabitants shifting in – a household, led by Lucy Liu and the That is Us actor Chris Sullivan with the newcomers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as their teenage kids. Like households usually do on this style, they’re arriving with extra baggage, tensions they hope will dissipate in a brand new house, a contemporary begin after a interval of unease.

Soderbergh shoots a collection of unbroken sequences because the presence witnesses the household fraying – a daughter grieving the lack of a pal, a mom prioritising her son as favorite, a father involved a few potential authorized battle – and we’re left to decipher what all of it may imply and the place we is likely to be going. For some time, the experiment actually works, questions over who the spirit is likely to be remaining unanswered together with its intentions, clarification over what style we’re even in remaining fascinatingly murky. Gliding round the home, Soderbergh has enjoyable discovering methods to contain us within the story, snippets and observations build up an uncommon picture of a household in hassle, from the micro to the macro, and a few daring touches of music recommend that we’re going someplace emotionally grand. However intrigue begins to waver as the image, and style, will get clearer.

The extra we get to know the household, the more durable it turns into to imagine their dynamic, Koepp’s imaginative and prescient of division a little bit too heavy-handed; mom and son rising as cartoonishly terrible counterparts to the saintliness of father and daughter. The extra relatable passive-aggression begins to get nastier however the powder keg fizzles relatively than ignites and when a extra typical thriller plot comes into play, it’s equally arduous to purchase, the delicately dropped crumbs of thriller main us to a surprisingly rote reveal. It’s half-hearted when it ought to be full-throated and by the tip, it’s solely the visible gimmick that separates this from commonplace style fare.

As an experiment, it stays of curiosity, one thing to be filed away as a curious technical train, and Soderbergh working at a decrease stage remains to be increased than lots of his friends. Presence simply by no means totally comes collectively in the way in which we hope, a ghost story haunted extra by the potential of what it may have been.

• Presence is exhibiting on the Sundance movie pageant and is in search of distribution

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