Presence 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

A family of four moves into a house haunted by a ghost. The members of the family are absorbed in their worries, and the ghost watches them idly until the student daughter begins to sense its presence.

Review 4K Movie

I think everyone has had the feeling of being watched. And waiting for something. Especially in moments of accidental (but this is questionable) success. Because success is deceptive and highly unreliable. It requires repetition and proof that it wasn't accidental. Sometimes from all this attention and expectation you want to hide somewhere. Like a closet. After the resounding success of his debut feature (Sex, Lies, and Videos), Steven Soderbergh could do something like this - his confusion about what to do next is reasonable. Or refused to play the game at all. Instead, one of the most non-conformist directors of our time decided to replay those rules. Which is clearly demonstrated to us (once again) by the example of the movie “Presence”.

The announcement of “Presence” sets the viewer in a certain mood. Ghost story. We are invited to a very cozy and old house, where the new tenants have just moved in - iron mom (Lucy Liu), tolerant dad (Chris Sullivan) and their two children Chloe Blue (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddie Maday). We will observe their family tragedy from an unusual angle - the view of a ghost, who unlike us can still influence the development of the plot (hello interactive “Mosaic”).

This acquaintance will not last long - the movie lasts an hour and a half, a little less, and perhaps this limitation does not give the story to touch the life of each of the people living in the house. No matter how you twist the camera, the ghost and the director's gaze is fixed on the figure of the daughter, Chloe Blue. Her closet is the ghost's favorite vantage point. But even when he leaves her, the focus is still on her personality - what books she reads, what drugs she takes, who Chloe Blue sleeps with. I can't say that Callina Liang pulls on the role of the first violin, in the final scene Lucy Liu beats her on one or two, and now I doubt whether it was pure skill of the actress or the director's plan to keep an ace up his sleeve until the last....

Yes, there are so many blurred lines in Presence, which is so obvious at first glance.

The idea of showing the story from the ghost's point of view is interesting, but sometimes (quite often) I had the feeling that I was watching not a movie, but a play, and the unnamed ghost acts as a resonator in this action. He gives verdicts and in a sense is not only a savior but also a villain. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the woman medium's phrase that she was wrong in her assumptions comes to mind, and the ghost's motives are threatening. Which in turn makes me wonder about the causal connections between the actions of the unnamed “guest” and the children's friend Ryan's pathologically fixated on controlling the “guest.” There is a rhyme in their narrative lines.

And had Soderbergh and co-writer David Koepp been more attentive to the other characters, that rhyme would have sounded meaty. Mom and Dad could have been left as they are, but Tyler could have been experimented with. It's all too obvious the authors are pitting the kids against each other; which one is more worthy of being on Rebecca's mom's radar. A pinch of doubt about Tyler's unqualified success would have made the story less unambiguous, and maybe even more ironic.

Bottom line: watching Presence was interesting, maybe not as exciting as I would have liked, but the fact that the director is open to dialog with the viewer after so many ups and career failures, rather than hiding in the closet, is worthy of respect. The game goes on.