David Lynch used two pseudonyms for Dune (1984). Universal wanted to add 50 minutes for television. Directors with credit disputes often went by the name Alan Smithee, as the Director’s Guild required credits but there may be disputes on who or if anyone should claim the work. For the butchered TV release, Lynch’s Dune writing credit went to Judas Booth, a nod to the biblical betrayer Judas and Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth. Two more Lynchian Doppelgängers to add to the legacy of one of our greatest artists. Pseudonyms have long been the domain of the disenfranchised director but Steven Soderbergh uses them in a different way.
When Soderbergh directs, shoots, and edits his own movies he uses three names: his given name and the first and middle names of his parents, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard. Soderbergh’s reasoning is smart, he does not want to dilute the credits with his own name over and over. To be the director is already to be the author of the work, any further credits may be superfluous.
Presence is a point-of-view ghost story from the perspective of the ghosts. It’s an inverted haunted house film. Soderbergh once again employs his father’s name as cinematographer but this time it has an extra layer.
The camera in Presence is a character. Soderbergh, then, is acting with the camera. The camera is an untethered apparition haunting a family who have just moved into this house, in a series of hanging long takes. The camera is Soderbergh, the camera is Soderbergh’s dedication to his father, and the camera is a poltergeist referred to as the titular “Presence”.
Moving can be its own horror story but it doesn’t stop at moving in for this family, who enter the home with their own strained dynamics. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the family matriarch and the glue holding everyone together. She is having marital difficulties with her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan). Their children meanwhile struggle to adapt to their new home in the suburbs, with their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) grieving the recent death of her friend and coming into early and constant contact with the Presence and their son Tyler (Eddie Maday) ingratiating himself to the popular burnout drug dealer of the school, Ryan (West Mulholland). Ryan harbors dark desires for Chloe, manipulating her moment of weakness for her body by gaslighting her, saying everything they do is her body and her choice, but his intentions are darker and less friendly than that.
Presence is a light horror movie that finds sprightly Sexagenarian Steven Soderbergh running through halls, panning around dramatic family sequences, and inserting the camera’s perspective both as the primary expositional understanding of the audience and as a fun apparitional gimmick.
Despite the ultra-lightweight model for the plot, which can only capture the sequence of events that happen in front of the camera, Presence is a work of ingenuity. The first of two Steven Soderbergh movies releasing this year — also see: Black Bag, a spy-thriller — Presence finds Soderbergh in complete control: his movie, his choice.
In less competent hands, Presence would fall apart as a ghostly gimmick. In Soderbergh’s hands, he’s able to reinvent the ghost story from the haunted house up. The floating camera gives new perspective to the cinema of poltergeists and it’s just as fun as it sounds for Soderbergh to twist convention and still take risks this late into his career. This time the risks have paid off.