“Steven Soderbergh has made some big films” over the course of his career, from “Ocean’s Eleven” to “Erin Brockovich”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. “And now, he’s made a very small one”: a microbudget ghost story “that reportedly took only three weeks to shoot”.
It tells the story of a married couple (Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan) who move to a recently renovated suburban house with their two children, only to discover that it’s inhabited by a mysterious “presence”. The film is shot from the point of view of the ghost, which inspects the new arrivals until their daughter (Callina Liang) senses it, at which point it retreats into a cupboard. It all builds to an interesting ending, but the film “never really scares”, and I found the central gimmick – of having the camera, wielded by Soderbergh himself, represent the ghost – rather wearying.
“Presence” is perhaps best understood not as a horror film but as a “mystery, a family drama, a supernatural nouveau-Poe tale”, said Martin Robinson in The London Standard. “The results are a film that’s certainly creepy but also moving, and the two come together in a twist that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.” Admittedly, some of the characterisation is “heavily drawn”, but the performances are excellent.
I found it “ingenious”, agreed Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. “Small but perfectly formed”, it’s “the filmmaking equivalent of one of those bicycles that folds into a backpack”. It’s a slight movie, to be sure, but “it packs quite a punch”.