Happily, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, “Presence,” gets back to basics. It’s a classically eerie ghost movie that’s not at all reliant on jump scares or metaphorical frights to unnerve viewers. “Presence” does away with all of those unnecessary frills found in contemporary horror, leaving one unusual, but very simple, stylistic device in their place: The camera is the ghost.
Soderbergh’s Ghost-O-Vision conceit requires no learning curve. It is uncomplicated and devoid of showy spectacle. Right from the initial glimpses inside the suburban home where the film is set, we can understand exactly how the rest of the film will look and feel. It’s not a gimmick or a trick. Rather, it’s a clever way for Soderbergh to make the viewer feel like a voyeur, listening in on increasingly intimate conversations that we wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. In your standard horror film, characters would (hopefully) speak so naturally that we would disregard the fact that we’re watching a movie. In “Presence,” we’re rarely allowed to forget that we are an interloper in the lives of a family as they slowly unspool. But as fascinating as the film is in technical form, it’s screenwriter David Koepp’s script that makes “Presence” a real draw. His writing is thorny and cuts deceptively deep, like a scrape that looks like a surface wound until it won’t stop bleeding. Soderbergh’s keen directorial experiment and Koepp’s screenplay enable “Presence” to flourish as one of the smartest horror dramas in recent memory, and no sage or exorcism will be enough to keep it from lingering beside you long after you leave this house.
