I’m not going in that room
Main Cast: Chris Sullivan, Lucy Lui
Director: Steven Soderberg
We had a free night having finished the most recent season of Top Chef, and I had just seen a new trailer on Hulu for a horror movie written by David Koep (writer of JURASSIC PARK, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, and SPIDER-MAN) based on an idea by and directed by Steven Soderberg (director of ERIN BROCKOVICH, OCEAN’S ELEVEN, and CONTAGION) called PRESENCE. A ghost story. I LOVE a good ghost story and this trailer looked very intense and exciting.
Yeah, that was a good trailer…
PRESENCE is the story of husband and wife Chris (Chris Sullivan) and Rebekah (Lucy Lui) and their children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). They’re just moving into a new house, haven’t even unpacked a single box, when Chloe senses something in her room.
The family is moving to a new school district because Chloe’s friend Nadia recently died and they’re looking for a fresh start in the same town. Tyler is a swimmer and on track to achieve greatness in his sport and this move will help in that endeavor.
Meanwhile, Rebekah is caught up in some shady business dealings while dad Chris just wants his family to be happy.
That would be a lot easier if not for the presence.
From the opening shot of this movie, we’re seeing events unfold from the point of view of some disembodied entity that floats through the house, following each member of the family and eavesdropping on their every move and word. But it has a penchant for keeping an eye on Chloe, often taking up refuge in her closet.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and found it very engaging, it wasn’t what the trailer promised. PRESENCE wasn’t scary, it wasn’t intense—not in the way I’d expected it to be—and I didn’t come away from it with a wary eye on my own closet, wondering what might be in it. Overall, PRESENCE was a movie that plays EVERYTHING close to the vest until the last maybe ten minutes of its hour and 25-minute run time.
The performances were good all around, and even played realistically. At one point I said to my wife, “I’ve never been big on Lucy Lui but there’s no way she’s sleeping with that guy,” something Chris himself admits later on when he says he’s always known Rebekah was out of his league. And that’s no slight on the actor, it’s just a fact.
Maday was at times intolerable as the overbearing lunkhead jock brother, while Liang rode that line between solemn and rebellious without slipping too far toward the dark side.
I enjoyed PRESENCE mostly for how it was told, from the POV of the ghost—a storytelling gimmick I’d never seen before—whose identity we don’t learn until the end of the movie, but there’s a line of dialogue earlier that will fly right by you if you’re not paying attention that answers the question of HOW. And believe me, if you don’t pick up on that line, you’re going to be asking HOW when you get to the end, so phones down, eyes up, ears open. PRESENCE isn’t a scary ghost story. But it is a damn well-made movie from, simply, one of the best directors in the business.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
Leave a Reply