Steven Soderbergh has made a ghost story with a screenplay from Hollywood veteran David Koepp. It sticks to a single location – the haunted family home – and the main character is the handheld camera’s ghostly point-of-view. It is the mute witness to everything that happens, roaming wordlessly around the house: up and down the stairs, in and out of the bedrooms, and evidently forbidden to go out back into the garden or out front on to the porch. We see what it sees.
Presence is conceived on elegant and economically spare lines, dialogue scenes are presented blankly, shot mostly from a distance (the ghost detached and hanging back) and interspersed with blackouts; it is well-acted, disciplined and intimate as a play. But for me it is marred by an early, unsubtle moment of overt supernatural creepiness, which signals a retreat from ingenuity and restraint. Perhaps it was a commercial concession to the idea that, for all the cool underplaying and periodic, uncanny sudden-chill moments in which a character will glance warily into the lens, the audience has to be reassured that this is a scary horror movie; it has to be shown what happens when an invisible ghost picks something up and carries it to the other side of the room. Surging strings on the soundtrack further underline the scariness.
