Steven Soderbergh’s new horror movie “Presence,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is unsettling all right.
The “Erin Brockovich” director moves his camera around so much, you want to yell at the screen, “Settle down, please! I have a headache!”
There is a rationale for his nearly-non-stop motion shtick: the audience is experiencing the haunted house from the perspective of a ghost. And this particular ghost apparently needs to get its steps in.
However, aside from a couple creepy voyeuristic scenes that the technique complements, its more obvious purpose is for Soderbergh to show off elaborate tracking shots.
PRESENCE
Running time: 85 minutes. Not yet rated.
That flashy panache will get him some pats on the back at Sundance, of course, but I have a hard time picturing average movie-goers going along for the ride.
The film starts, as so many scary flicks do, with a family moving into a suburban house that doesn’t look quite right.
Whenever you spot a wide wooden staircase with oddly shaped lamps built into the bannister, you can be sure that Ryan Murphy is lurking nearby, ready to shove Zachary Quinto onto it.
Mom Rebecca (Lucy Liu) dotes on her popular, high-school-age son Tyler (Eddy Maday) while dad Chris (Chris Sullivan) has a special connection to his quiet, somewhat rebellious daughter Chloe (Callinia Liang), whose friend just died.
Tyler’s pal from school, played by West Mulholland, also skulks around.
While “Presence” is shown from the vantage of Casper, it’s mostly Chloe’s story, as the spirit is fixated on her.
Eddy Maday, Callina Liang and West Mulholland take the red carpet at Sundance. Getty Images Even as the camerawork dilutes the acting, soft-spoken Liang makes an impression as a chilling ingenue trying to get her life back to normal after a tragedy.
Not much of what Nearly Headless Nick does is all that frightening. Invisible, it hovers some textbooks and knocks down a shelf. It doesn’t touch people though. When it wants to get somebody’s attention, it uses a cheesy-looking trick like Aquaman doing echolocation.
When the fam realizes the house is haunted, their real-estate agent’s sister who has “a second sight” comes in to diagnose the problem.
That seance-adjacent scene, which is about as eerie as Dolly Parton, is one of many missed opportunities to properly freak out the viewer.
Lucy Liu attends the Sundance premiere of “Presence.” Charles Sykes/Invision/AP The closest Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (who collaborated on the similarly meh “Kimi”) get to good ol’ horror paralysis is the wrap-up, which shrewdly combines primal fears and timely issues. It’s a satisfying finale to build to, even if I didn’t totally believe that a bad guy who has been so good at covering his tracks would make such a dumb error.
“Presence” is a brisk 85 minutes, which is nice if you have dinner plans, but it also exposes limited storytelling ambitions. It’s a mid-season episode of TV. We don’t get to know much about the characters, and don’t care either way about their fate.
But cool tracking shot, Steve.
