I often think about something a friend pointed out while watching Steven Soderbergh’s “The Knick,” a phenomenal, short-lived Showtime series in which Clive Owen played a hilariously arrogant, drug-addicted surgeon at a New York City hospital circa 1900. The show was set in the distant past but shot on shimmery digital video and scored with the bleeps and bloops of modern electronic music. Such formal anachronisms were Soderbergh’s way of conveying the era’s excitement in exploring new frontiers of science and medicine, trying to put us in the mindset of characters who felt like they were discovering the future. During certain dialogue scenes, it was impossible not to notice the camera ever-so-slightly moving up and down. “See,” my friend elbowed me and smiled. “It’s breathing.”
Soderbergh pseudonymously serves as his own cinematographer and editor — he’s the closest thing mainstream filmmaking has to a one-man band — and there’s no shortage of stabilizing devices he could have used on the camera to keep the image still. But the whole point of shooting “The Knick” like that was to put you in that hospital room alongside those characters. You’re there. You’re the one who’s breathing.
Soderbergh’s new film “Presence” is a ghost story in which you’re the ghost, a haunted house movie in which the audience is doing the haunting. (Or I guess technically Soderbergh is, since he’s the guy holding the camera.) Horror movies often cut to the predator’s point of view for a moment or two in order to goose the tension. Here’s a whole picture filmed entirely from that perspective, hovering above and around a suburban family who recently moved into a handsome New Jersey home, not realizing that something was already living there.
We watch them through the eyes of that something, whether we’re looming over the characters’ heads or eavesdropping on them from across the room. “Presence” is like the surveillance horror of the “Paranormal Activity” movies taken to a more logistically difficult extreme, with entire scenes playing out in single, unbroken takes as the spectral spectator drifts up and down the stairs, darting in and out of bedrooms. (If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by the 62-year-old camera operator. I got tired just watching some of these shots.) “Presence” is a gimmick movie with a great gimmick. Too bad about the ”movie” part.
Lucy Liu stars as Rebekah, the family’s tightly wound matriarch we watch sneaking off for furtive phone calls to her lawyer about some unspecific illegality in which she’s been involved at work. Rebekah dotes so much on her cruel and obnoxious teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday) that her beleaguered husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) needs to remind her sometimes that she has another child, too. Their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is in mourning and acting out after the deaths of two school friends from fentanyl overdoses. Chloe appears to be an object of eerie fascination for the spirit in the house, but she’s also in danger for other reasons that will reveal themselves over the course of the film’s fleet 85 minutes.
Ever since “Presence” premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Soderbergh has taken pains in interviews to stress that this is a family drama in the guise of a supernatural thriller. No matter that he borrows the font from “Poltergeist” for the credits, the most you’ll get for special effects are some books being moved around and a couple of shelves knocked over. (I can’t imagine restless, Friday night horror film audiences will be happy with the lack of overt shocks and scares.) It’s more unnerving than frightening, more sad than scary, with Chloe’s smooth-talking, rich-kid boyfriend a good deal more dangerous than anything in her bedroom from mysterious realms beyond. Which I guess might be the point?
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The problem is that the visual conceit isn’t conducive to the story Soderbergh is trying to tell. By keeping our perspective limited to that of the hovering spirit, we’re robbed of any closeups on these actors, deprived of the emotional intimacy well-chosen shots can conjure. The movie is hobbled by its central gimmick, which cuts the filmmaker off from most of the tools of his trade.
This is especially true with regard to editing. Since every scene must unfold in a single take without any cuts, there’s no opportunity for Soderbergh to play with the tension or adjust the actors’ timing. There’s no chance for him to remove dead air between their line readings, or finesse the performances the way editors do on every other movie. And given the restrictions of the ghost-eye-view, we’re usually not seeing what happens from dramatically satisfying angles.
“Presence” probably seemed more impressive last year at Sundance, before RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” so radically re-wrote the rule book for first-person POV movies. I know, it hardly seems fair to compare the two pictures in terms of scope and ambition, but Ross found such a stunning variety of images within a similar visual idea that Soderbergh’s little exercise can’t help but look anemic in its wake. (Oh, we’re gliding up those same stairs again?)
Following HBO Max’s nifty 2022 Alexa-gone-bad thriller “Kimi,” this is the director’s second collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp, Hollywood’s blockbuster go-to guy who over the past three decades has been responsible for everything from the first “Jurassic Park” and “Mission: Impossible” movies to those last two lousy “Indiana Jones” films. He’s a sturdy, unexciting writer who’s become a favorite of gifted visualists like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, David Fincher and now Soderbergh, I think because he can be counted on to provide a clear runway between camera-centric set-pieces. There’s a “high floor, low ceiling” quality to Koepp scripts, with their functional, unmemorable characters who exist at the service of the story. (The only truly unforgettable characters I can recall Koepp writing were in “Carlito’s Way,” and that probably has more to do with them being played by Al Pacino and Sean Penn.)
Putting it politely, he’s not a guy you want writing your family drama, even one that’s in the guise of a supernatural thriller. There’s an admittedly clever, B-movie satisfaction when the plot mechanics start clicking into place, especially when it comes to the identity of the spirit. But despite some nice work by Sullivan — who was so wonderful as Cleary the ambulance driver on “The Knick” — these characters remain remote and emotionally out of reach. Koepp can’t even come up with a colorful psychic for a sequence so flat it feels like a placeholder in a draft to be turned in later.
Steven Soderbergh makes a lot of movies. “Presence” is his 33rd feature in 36 years, and that doesn’t include his documentaries, short subjects, or the eight television series he’s directed. It’s an astonishing work ethic, but sometimes it can seem like he’s on a treadmill, shooting concepts before they have the chance to get fully fleshed out into stories. Soderbergh has the kind of mind that gets lit up by logistical challenges — which is probably why he makes so many heist pictures — and whether he’s testing the limits of shooting on an iPhone or filming a whole movie from a ghost’s point of view, at times it feels like he’s making these projects just to see if he can pull them off.
Then again, the nice thing about following an artist so staggeringly prolific is that if you’re disappointed in a Soderbergh picture, he’s probably already got another one shot and in the can. Indeed, his Koepp-scripted “Black Bag,” starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married assassins, opens March 15. Hopefully that one will breathe.
“Presence” is now in theaters.