Steven Soderbergh tells a masterful ghost story: npr

IN Presence, Chloe (Callina Liang) is the first to capture strange phenomena in the family’s new home.

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The ghost-the-thriller Presence Have a formal imagination so wise, I am surprised that it has never been done or tried before. Maybe another movie hair done what I do not realize. This is a ghost story told entirely from the ghost’s point of view: We see what the ghost sees.

The ghost cannot leave the house and therefore the movie never leaves the house either. You could say that the ghost is played by the director, Steven Soderbergh, who as usual serves as his own film photographer and works under the pseudonym Peter Andrews. It is Soderbergh who holds the camera as it slides up and down the stairs, follows the characters from space to room and hovering over them as they try to find out what’s going on.

As the film opens, Rebecca and Chris, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, are moving into a beautiful craftsman’s house with their two teenage children. The family’s dynamics are tense and a bit on the nose: Rebecca, a high -tension type working with Finance, obviously prefers their popular, funny son, Tyler. Chris is the milder spouse and parent, and he has a close bond with their daughter, Chloe, who is more quiet and more withdrawn.

Although we get to know this foursome, the film’s most interesting and enigmatic character is the silent ghost behind the camera. You keep asking yourself who is This ghost, and what does it want? Is it the spirit of the former owner of the house, or is it a completely different one who has an unspoken connection with the family?

Before long, paranormal things begin to happen. The ghost begins to manifest in physical ways, causes the lights to flicker and the walls to rattle, or knock a cup of juice in the floor. At first, only Chloe, played by Callina Liang, seems to notice these strange phenomena, and she tries in vain to tell her parents and Tyler about what’s happening.

Tyler, played by Eddy Maday, is a bit of a Hothead. He has little patience with his sister’s concerns, which, we soon experience, is linked to a recent tragedy involving one of her best friends. Presence is not just a disturbing ghost story; It is one of the more sharp movies I have seen about the inner life of teenagers, whether it is their feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction or their vulnerability to gossip from high school and even worse.

Eventually, Chloe begins to date Ryan, a friend of Tyler, and there is a voyeuristic nausea about the way the camera – which means the ghost – intercepts their intimacy moments. There is no pruring these moments; On the contrary, what you feel is the ghost’s huge concern for Chloe.

Soderbergh’s camera movements are so delicate and expressive that he can convey empathy with a single jerk or horror, or rage with a sudden, violent jerk. Soon we realize that the ghost is not trying to scare this family; It tries to warn them.

No American director makes independent films as handy and resourceful as Steven Soderbergh. This is his latest collaboration with the veteran manuscript writer David Koepp, whom he last worked with at the Home-Invasion Thriller KimiAs brilliantly reinvented Hitchcocks Rear window for Alexas and Covid’s age.

Like KimiBut in a completely different way, Presence Make brilliant use of spatial inclusion and extract maximum voltage from a minimalist premise. As always, it seems that Soderbergh has approached this material as a technical challenge, a problem to be solved: how Do Do you make a movie exclusively from a ghost pov? Soderbergh has mentioned in interviews that he wore martial arts to dampen his footsteps while chasing his actors around the house with his camera. I’m usually not big on documentaries behind the scenes but Presence is a movie I would make an exception for.

But while Soderbergh might span its technique, Presence Never feel like a pure exercise. This is mainly due to the fine actors, especially Liang as the sensitive, troubled Chloe and Sullivan as a loving family father trying to maintain peace in a scary situation. Their achievements are joking in every sense of the word.