Taking the perspective of the monster is a venerable technique in horror movies. It is perhaps used most effectively in the opening to Halloween, where a long opening shot from the perspective of a young Michael Myers shows him stabbing his older sister; there is that brilliant, terrifying transition where the camera cuts back to third person, and we realise that this vicious murderer whose gaze we have shared is only a child. Friday the 13th uses this technique as well (and was parodied memorably in the Boy Scouts episode of the The Simpsons, in a sequence which I found pretty scary when I was a kid).
Presence, the latest film from the extraordinarily versatile Steven Soderbergh, is filmed entirely from the perspective of a ghost, doomed to haunt a spacious house in suburbia. In the film’s opening scene, the ghost appears to be stuck in a loop, walking from the upstairs window, downstairs, and back again; this loop is broken by the arrival of a realtor (Julia Fox), and then by an affluent family, the Paynes, who are looking to purchase the house.
The ghost fixates immediately on their daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), following her upstairs as she explores her new home. It is through the ghost’s eyes that we learn about the tensions that divide the Paynes from each other. Chloe’s brother, Tyler (Eddy Maday), is arrogant and insensitive, particularly towards his sister, who has recently lost two friends to drug overdoses. Her mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), clearly idolises the champion athlete Tyler; her father, Chris (Chris Sullivan), is affectionate and tender, but somewhat ineffectual in the face of his wife’s dominant personality.
All these characters are very well-drawn, with superb performances, and highly naturalistic dialogue. This sense of naturalism is, paradoxically, aided by the film’s unique point of view; the ghost cannot leave the house, so if a conversation is taking place outside, or in another room, the voices are muffled and sometimes become inaudible. It really does feel as if the viewer has been placed in the midst of a family that is slowly but inexorably drifting towards disaster.
What is truly remarkable about Presence, however, is the way that it handles the character of the ghost, the film’s protagonist. The ghost never speaks, and rarely intervenes in events, except for some occasional poltergeist activity. The film was shot entirely by Soderbergh himself, who apparently went creeping around the cast in a pair of slippers. With incredibly deft camerawork, he somehow manages to paint an intriguing picture of the ghost’s personality. When it is watching two people talking, it looks urgently from one to the other, as if it is trying to understand what they are saying. It hides itself when Chloe senses that it is nearby. Notwithstanding its fixation on her, it doesn’t want to watch her have sex with Tyler’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland). But is it protective of her, or possessive?
All of these narrative touches build a wonderful sense of ambiguity throughout the film. Until the film’s conclusion, the ghost’s motivations remain unknown, and the question of its identity becomes more and more pressing. The film tells what is, objectively, a quite typical ghost story. There is the obligatory arrival of a psychic, and even the ominous orchestral score would not be out of place in a much more traditional movie of this genre. But the choice of the ghost’s perspective results in a film with far more pathos than a typical ghost story. The ghost is not just an apparition glimpsed in mirrors or in doorways; it really does feel like the faded echo of a human being, held back on earth for reasons it is barely conscious of.
The film reminded me quite a bit of last year’s excellent In a Violent Nature, an unorthodox slasher film which followed the killer, an immortal Jason Voorhees analogue, rather than his victims. The director of that film, Chris Nash, described it as an “ambient slasher,” which is a very apt description; it is surprisingly relaxing, watching the killer walk through the woods for fifteen minutes until he stumbles on a victim by accident. However, where In a Violent Nature deliberately eschewed even the minor character development required by a slasher film, Presence is very much a character piece. The members of the family are flawed, and often cruel to one another; but there is a powerful sense of empathy throughout, anchored in the melancholic gaze of the ghost.
Towards the end, the film does almost verge into melodrama, with the revelation of a slightly over-the-top villain. But the conclusion has a huge emotional payoff that arguably justifies this approach. Ghost stories are fascinating because they have a strong element of fatalism, the sense that we are all doomed to live incomplete lives—that we are all acting out the same failures again and again in real time. But they can also offer the possibility of reaching back and redeeming those failures. For this reason, notwithstanding its startling formal experimentation, Presence truly gets to the heart of the genre.
Presence opened yesterday in cinemas.