The first more-or-less horror movie in the lengthy, genre-skimming career of director Steven Soderbergh, Presence is a film about grief, trauma, familial dysfunction and abusive masculinity. But it’s also, to a significant and compelling extent, about property. Beginning with a family’s first viewing of a handsome Victorian home in an unidentified stretch of suburbia, the film never ventures outside its walls for the next 85 minutes, as the ensuing chills make us consider the merits of that purchase. Wittily and unnervingly shot from the perspective of the restless spirit roaming its halls, it’s a haunted house film in which much of the tension feels determined by the shape and flow and light and shade of the house itself. It’s a while since I’ve seen a film where I could quite so exactly draw the floor plan of its primary location, even months after viewing.
Presence is the latest entry, then, in a subset of films set in a house that gradually takes on a life and personality of its own – not just a vivid or spectacular set, but a space that begins to dictate proceedings as much as any of the human characters’ actions. Horror cinema is, of course, particularly conducive to this kind of building control – a genre where every cranny is a potential threat or refuge.
