Steven Soderbergh’s Presence challenges the found-footage horror movie

The blowout success of 1999’s The Blair Witch Challenge actually did a quantity on the horror style. It wasn’t the primary faux-found-footage film, and even the first found-footage horror movie. Nevertheless it landed throughout a interval the place handheld cameras have been more and more small and low-cost, horror was rising in popularity and mainstream, and internet-based advertising and marketing let the creators goal their excellent viewers, successfully turning their movie into viral creepypasta.

Between its large box-office success and the seeming ease of duplicating it cheaply, The Blair Witch Challenge launched a fad for found-footage horror that peaked and ebbed over the course of a long time, and nonetheless sometimes resurfaces in initiatives like 2023’s underground sensation Skinamarink. In Steven Soderbergh’s hypnotic, minimalist ghost story Presence, although, the found-footage film fashion might have discovered its last kind.

Presence facilities on a haunting in a luxuriously modernized century-old residence, newly occupied by a troubled household filled with fault traces. Waifish teen daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is reeling after the dying of her finest pal. Her smug, smug older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) is unsympathetic; the household has simply moved fully so he can get into a greater faculty district, the place his swim-team stardom would possibly take him additional. Their dad and mom, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) are at odds about every thing, notably easy methods to cope with Chloe’s despair and doable substance abuse, and easy methods to reasonable Rebekah’s clear and absolute favoritism for Tyler. As all of them navigate their very own emotional trials, an invisible, intangible presence — represented by the digicam — stalks via the home, observing all of them even of their most non-public moments.

Technically talking, Presence isn’t actually a found-footage film within the Blair Witch Challenge vein. There’s no pretense that Soderbergh’s first-person narrative is precise digicam footage, not to mention “misplaced” digicam footage unearthed someday after the digicam operator met a horrible destiny. However every thing in regards to the film performs throughout the visible fashion that got here to be broadly generally known as found-footage horror: The viewers sees your entire film via Soderbergh’s lens, representing the one witness that connects all of the narrative threads.

On this case, although, the digicam isn’t a jumpy, queasy handheld system, as in The Blair Witch Challenge, Cloverfield, or Behind the Masks: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. It isn’t a collection of sources like safety techniques or static cameras, as in [REC] or Paranormal Exercise. It’s a warmly lit, crisply realized eye shifting via the story, gliding round the home and the brand new inhabitants with inhuman smoothness that will get throughout the alienness of the entity. Presence’s whole premise is that the story is framed by a ghostly voyeur hovering over the forged, taking of their wants and fears, however initially unable to speak its personal.

Soderbergh’s strategy faucets into the found-footage horror thought of a narrative being skilled by whoever’s behind the digicam, besides on this case, the query of who’s behind the digicam is a part of the horror. From the beginning, Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (who additionally wrote Soderbergh’s easy, environment friendly 2022 action-thriller Kimi) suggest that the presence is a ghost — however till the motion totally performs out, the viewers is left to wonder if it’s one thing else fully, together with what it desires and the way and whether or not it can ultimately make its wants recognized. The filmmakers inevitably construct in just a few small leap scares, however for essentially the most half, Presence is about low-key, slow-burn curiosity somewhat than lurking terror.

For audiences anticipating breathless tips out of the standard found-footage horror playbook — the sorts of barely glimpsed threats and dimly lit shocks a fast-moving, low-fidelity digicam allows — Soderbergh’s strategy could seem perverse. The home’s brilliant, open airiness and richly appointed rooms make it seem to be an unlikely and even ill-suited house for a haunting. There’s no probability the digicam will ever abruptly seize some sudden, horrifying specter, as a result of the digicam is the specter.

The place one other story might need made the ghost’s looming presence and intimate proximity to the characters into a continuing eerie menace, Presence’s ghost appears benign, even distanced. Just like the lonely, faceless ghost in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, it appears both incapable of affecting the household, or uninterested. Till it isn’t.

However the uniqueness of that strategy is a part of the attraction. Presence is extra mental than visceral, extra engaged with elevating questions than pinning viewers to their seats. Which makes it really feel like a extra grown-up tackle the found-footage film. If The Blair Witch represented the subgenre’s wiry adolescence, then format extensions like Unfriended and comparable screenlife horror movies have been its experimental younger maturity, and Presence is its full grownup kind.

In rising up, although, the style has misplaced loads of its startling, partaking rawness and vérité vitality. Presence is extra sedate, subtle, and polished than its found-footage predecessors, but it surely’s additionally much less emotionally partaking, despite its dedicated performances and the uncooked, aching emotions of grief, anger, resentment, and loneliness the central household is navigating. Bringing their story in at a slim 85 minutes, Soderbergh and Koepp don’t give the premise or the format sufficient time to get predictable, however in addition they solely not often give their story a way of urgency or pleasure. It’s found-footage horror as an mental train somewhat than a heart-racing emotional one.

All of which suggests Presence is only one extra in Soderbergh’s countless line of cinematic experiments with kind than it’s a fad-launching phenomenon within the vein of The Blair Witch Challenge. That is one finish stage for a still-evolving subgenre, not the start of a brand new one. For Soderbergh, who’s all the time been desirous about innovating and pushing motion pictures to the subsequent stage, then shifting on, that’s most likely sufficient. For deep-in-the-weeds horror followers anticipating a extra acquainted model of scares, although, Presence might really feel like an odd iteration on a well-known trope — one thing that feels extra grown-up and extra singular than all these more and more samey racing-around-with-a-camera horror motion pictures of a long time previous, however nonetheless not fairly as a lot enjoyable.

Presence is in theaters now.