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They’re selling “Presence” as a horror movie when it’s something else entirely: a ghost story as told from the point of view of the ghost. As such, it’s more unsettling than scary, more dramatically gripping than nerve-shredding. And it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, so you know it has to be smart.
Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist. Soderbergh always seems most interesting when he’s bored and gives himself an artistic or technical challenge, and here, with a camera that silently roams an old suburban house, unable to step past the doors outside, the challenge is putting the audience inside the mind of a phantom as it yearns to protect the family’s most vulnerable member.
That would be Chloe (Callina Liang), a teenager still reeling from the death of her best friend after an apparent overdose. When the family moves in at the start of “Presence,” Chloe immediately feels something in the room with her, her eyes darting uncertainly toward the camera’s gaze, which nervously beats a retreat to the safety of the girl’s bedroom closet.
The screenplay by David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible”) sketches in the rest of the family with broad but adroit strokes: ruthless tiger mom Rebekah (Lucy Liu), a business executive whose instincts aren’t strictly legal; her son Tyler (Eddy Maday), a swaggering high school swimming star and the mother’s perfect prince; and dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), a gentle giant who feels he married out of his league and is just beginning to realize his mistake.
These relationships tend toward the schematic, but this is a ghost story, remember, and the ghost’s curiosity compels it to wander from room to room, watching a family hurtling toward meltdown. Chloe’s extrasensory antenna leads her to realize there’s a spirit in the house, and Liang achingly conveys the raw adolescent confusion and resistance of a young woman who knows what she feels, no matter what anyone tells her.
Sullivan is touchingly empathetic in his scenes with Liang – they’re two outcasts in a house of strivers – and Liu works to make her role more than a cartoon. The only other characters who intrude on the family are Tyler’s high school friend Ryan (West Mulholland), who shows Chloe an unexpected sensitive side, and a part-time neighborhood psychic (Natalie Woolams-Torres), who corroborates Chloe’s and Chris’s fears even as Rebekah and Tyler mock her as a con artist.
“Presence” gets the maximum return from a minimum of setting and concept, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. (If anything, it seems to wrap up a little too quickly.) This has become a Soderbergh hallmark, and it puts him in the tradition of classic studio-era craftsmen who cranked out unassuming gem after unassuming gem and did so on time and under budget. There isn’t a wasted shot or an untrimmed frill; you feel you’re in the hands of a master who no longer needs to prove himself.
Is the ghost that of Chloe’s dead friend? “Presence” leaves the matter unresolved and leans toward a larger mystery, one that nags at a viewer with an inconsolable air of loneliness. The fluid camerawork (by Soderbergh himself) holds the movie together with a restless, anxious personality of its own.
“It doesn’t know why it’s here,” says the psychic of the phantom. “There’s something it needs to do, but it doesn’t know what.” By contrast, “Presence” knows exactly what it needs to do: haunt the family up to the end credits and the audience well beyond.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
Three and one-half stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains violence, drug material, language, sexuality and teen drinking. 84 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.