Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: Presence

Steven Soderbergh. While best known for his breakout film Sex, Lies and Videotape, his award winning films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, his Ocean's Number-of-people-on-the-Team films, and his flirtation with communist thugs (Che), he's actually made a lot of trash you've never even heard of. Or if you've heard of it, you didn't know he directed it. Or you knew he directed it but forgot it right after you heard about some controversy.

Like, did you know he directed the Magic Mike movies? Did you remember the controversy where he hired an actual porn star to star in his movie Girlriend Experience about a hooker? He directed Gina Carano's disappointing feature debut, Haywire.

Perhaps most relevant to today's film, he also directed Contagion, which was a serious look at what would happen if Gwyneth Paltrow infected everyone with a deadly disease. It fit comfortably into the zombie genre (though there are no zombies) and felt kind of like a grown up entry into a hyper-sensationalized field.

This strength, the low-key realism, was also its weakness. It felt competent without being lurid, but a little more luridness might also have been more fun to watch.

Tiger MILF?

When I saw he had directed Presence, that's what I expected: A low-key, mature take on a haunted house story, like Paranormal Activity without the cheesy SFX.

Presence is exactly that: Done entirely from the haunting entity's POV, we watch as a family moves into a (gorgeous, natch) house and learn about their weird little family dramas from the ghost eavesdropping. The youngest daughter has recently lost a friend to unnatural causes: suicide? drug overdoes? maybe something even more sinister? This closeness to death has made her sensitive to the titular presence.

The presence is shy and timid, getting close to the living, only to retreat behind doors and railings when spotted. Or sensed, really. While the presence is able to affect the world, she is not visible in any normal way.

Ghosts: More afraid of you than you are of them.

Chloe (Callina Liang) comes to believe that the presence is her deceased friend. There's not really a reason for that to be true, and I ended up thinking it wasn't true, but I did come to think of the presence as a young female. Besides the furtive behavior, the presence has an affinity for Chloe, and has her only big outburst when Chloe's brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) relates a story about how he and a bunch of his jock friend tormented and bullied an insufficiently attractive girl.

While Chloe binds with her dad (Chris Sullivan), Tyler is mom's favorite. Mom (Lucy Liu) has invested her entire emotional being into Tyler. And he's a real jerk, which pains his father and strains Mom and Dad's already strained relationship—quite apart from the dodgy financial shenanigans mom appears to be engaging in at work. (The kids by the way are really Asian, so I kept wondering if they were adopted but, no, he's supposed to be their genetic father.)

When your genes are really recessive.

Anyway, lack of communication leads to ghostly shenanigans and family tragedy, and this is one of those sad, low-key horror movies, almost like an early Guillermo Del Toro type.

It's not really scary. The lead character is the ghost. (And I thought of Beetlejuice more than once.) Since the only supernatural force is sympathetic, we must look for our monsters among the humans, and they are easy enough to find there.

It was exactly as I thought it would be. I enjoyed it, but it didn't knock my socks off. I really appreciated the flipping of the POV to where a frightened ghost might look like a menace from the standpoint of the living. But there was a scene where a medium shows up to pull a little Zelda Rubinstein act, and I thought it really would've been shocking to have the ghost go into her body and look out from it.

Too flashy for Mr. Soderbergh, I guess, but it seemed to me like a missed opportunity.

David Koepp wrote the screenplay, and it's nice that it hangs together well and make sense. Koepp wrote and directed one of my favorite ghost stories, Stir of Echoes and also wrote and directed The Secret Window and the ill-fated Mortdecai, both with Johnny Depp. As a writer, he wrote such smash hits as Jurassic Park, Death Becomes Her, Panic Room, the Dan Brown movies an the last two Indiana Jones movies.

So, this is better than some of those and worse than some of the others.

The two (Soderbergh and Koepp) have a spy thriller coming out next week (March 15th) with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. I'm sure it'll be fine.

I don't want to be negative but...

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

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