Like so many trendy ghost tales (from “The Amityville Horror” to a number of entries within the “Paranormal Exercise” collection), “Presence” begins with a household buying a brand new home, making a deal that appears too good to be true. After buying their residence from a sweet-talking actual property agent (performed by Julia Fox), the household — mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) — transfer in and virtually instantly start having points that don’t have anything in any respect to do with the supernatural presence watching them. Rebecca is concerned with some sort of unlawful monetary scheme that supposedly will profit aspiring jock Tyler, Chris is quietly investigating whether or not or not it makes authorized sense to divorce his spouse, and Chloe is lonesomely coping with the lack of one in all her greatest associates, Nadia, a woman on the town who died after apparently overdosing.
It is throughout her solitary moments that Chloe begins to develop into conscious of the presence that appears to be fixated on her, and whereas initially it is doable that the ghost could not have her greatest intentions at coronary heart, with every passing encounter plainly it is making an attempt to look out for her. On the very least, it seems to be agitated every time Tyler mistreats her, or when Tyler’s pal (West Mulholland) turns into her new secret boyfriend. From this, Chloe presumes that the entity of their home could also be Nadia’s spirit, trying to both obtain revenge for what could have been her homicide or, alternatively, seeking to merely not be forgotten.
The most important aspect inside Soderbergh’s filmography is the notion of confession — from “Intercourse, Lies, and Videotape” to “Kimi” (his prior collaboration with Koepp), his movies function characters telling the viewers and/or one another their deepest secrets and techniques in varied methods. The central gimmick of “Presence” permits this concept of the confessional to occur naturally: after all these individuals are talking and performing frankly, as a result of they don’t know that somebody is watching them. That the “somebody” is each a presence inside the movie and with out it — i.e. us viewers members — is one thing Soderbergh appears cognizant of all through, and he blurs the strains between participant and viewer in a approach that feels thrillingly Nouvelle Obscure.