150 Word Reviews: 'Presence' (2024)
Who's there?
Director Steven Soderbergh stars as a ghost quietly watching a family in his low-budget, slow-building haunted house movie Presence. Well, he is the cinematographer and the director, and his floating camera serve as the eyes of something invisible, a specter lurking in closets and gliding down stars. Seeing the living world through the POV of a supernatural voyeur is more than a gimmick, it adds an unexpected sadness, as if we're the guardian angel of a struggling, sharply intelligent teen played by Calluna Liang.
According to a psychic, the undead suffer in the past and the future.
Her mom is a solid Lucy Lui, a workaholic, distant from her troubled daughter. Chris Sullivan is more sympathetic as her dad and her brother, Edday Maday's surly Tyler, couldn't care less about his sister. Soderbergh is an inventive and entertaining master who humbly cranks out one or two polished bangers a year.
Indeed the most likeable things about Soderbergh is his workmanlike versatility.