Presence 2024 A small film succeeds where bigger films failed. by Danusha V. Goska
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/presence-2024/
“For English, press one.”“Please listen carefully. Our menu options have changed.” “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.” “All our representatives are helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably.”
Some of us have lost some genetic lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and when we request our prognosis.
Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn’t gift cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn’t say anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets to you.
In November, 2024, I coped with my latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I wasn’t taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.
Friends? “Cancer ghosting” is a thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I’d soon be reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were, simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss was willing to hang out with me.
In January, 2025, I was going for a walk and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality programming that sneaks in.
A man was speaking. He was a white guy, older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and with himself. Ghost stories, the man was saying, are “essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there’s an afterlife. Something comes beyond” death, he said. I am intimidated by scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.
The man continued in a voice, that, unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the wash.
“In my own life,” he said, “during periods that I would describe as traumatic, I felt more open to people around me, and maybe had a little easier time perceiving their own difficulties or their own pain. I wondered, if a person goes through trauma, does that open you up to sense other things that you couldn’t sense before?” He mentioned a girl named Chloe. Chloe, he said, is “an open wound. She’s been through this horrific experience, and so she is open to the universe.” It is kind, this man was saying, to make eye contact with someone in pain and to say, “I’m sorry that you suffer.”
This man didn’t have an ax to grind. He was speaking in the most universal terms about trauma and death. He wasn’t talking about how hard it is to be black and to have a ghost in your house, or to be trans and to go through trauma, or to be gay and to get a scary diagnosis. He was talking about universal stuff: life, death, the space between. His speech was not excluding, dividing, singling out for blame, or for settling scores. His speech was inviting and truly inclusive. Such speech is rare on NPR. He sounded the way you’d imagine a small town doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting would sound. His words were the most soothing words I had heard in my latest dance with death.
That man is screenwriter David Koepp. Let’s see if you’ve heard of the films for which he wrote the script: Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Carlito’s Way, Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town, Panic Room, and other films. His output has earned billions of dollars worldwide. Koepp has written the script for the 2024 film Presence, a ghost story. Well, I’ll be darned. I had sought comfort from friends, who “ghosted” me, and from a Catholic priest, who did not have time for me. Once again, Hollywood was coming to the rescue.
I submit to the premise and the demands of a movie theater, and that submission benefits me. The theater’s four walls close out surrounding reality. The giant image immerses me in another world. Movie theaters suppress my attention deficit. I can’t get up and start doing dishes or opening mail. For at least two hours, I have to participate in a communal escape on a shared magic carpet. Seeing good movies in a theater is my therapy. I wondered if I should go see Presence.
I hesitated. Awards-bait movies are released in autumn. My movie-going autumn had been a bust. In Wicked, a green (black) female, Elphaba, defies the corrupt white man ruling Oz and escapes on a broomstick. But Elphaba never accomplishes anything, or helps anybody. The Brutalist had not a scintilla of authenticity in its alleged depiction of a character meant to be a brilliant Hungarian Jewish immigrant architect but who was really just a transparent sock puppet for filmmaker Brady Corbet’s self-pitying, self-aggrandizing narcissism and anti-capitalism, anti-Christian harangue.
Queer attempts to elevate William S. Burroughs to a martyr for gays. In fact, gun-toting Burroughs was contemptuous of gay men. Burroughs was a mentally ill heroin addict and frequenter of Third World underage prostitutes. He lived off his parents’ money. He shot his wife to death, abandoned his son, and then later corrupted him. Billy Junior died at age 33 after vomiting blood on his father. Burroughs let his mother, who had supported him financially, slowly die alone tied to a chair in a nursing home.
Babygirl is advertised as a hot, brave, feminist depiction of a middle-aged, high-powered executive fulfilling her kinky desires with her skinny, tattooed, twenty-something intern. Babygirl performs the breathtaking feat of making a master/slave sexual relationship boring.
These awards-bait films, though of diverse genres, budgets, and box office, all shared a common denominator, one also shared by Megalopolis, Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, and Substance. All these films are distinctive because they are someone’s passion project, and all attempt to overturn Hollywood convention. Wicked’s very title telegraphs its mission – take an iconic screen villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, and turn her into a good guy. In Babygirl, a feminist character, like the film’s director, craves to be sexually dominated by a man. Francis Ford Coppola is enough of a Hollywood deity that he can make any damn movie he wants, including Megalopolis, which few critics or audiences liked or even understood.
The most interesting thing about Emilia Perez are its offscreen controversies. Karla Sofia Gascon stars. The industry wants to celebrate Gascon because he is a man who identifies as a woman. But Gascon has posted online comments like, “How many times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain?” A Woke quandary. We jettisoned the word “actress” because recognizing a female performer’s difference from a man is taboo. But in reference to Gascon, the bad, bad word “actress” is resurrected. To call a woman an “actress” is a thought crime. To call a man an “actress” is progressive.
Brady Corbet manipulates his Brutalist characters to do things that they wouldn’t do in real life. Truth to character isn’t important to Corbet; his anti-capitalist message is. In Golden Age Hollywood, filmmakers lived by Sam Goldwyn’s dictum: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” In other words, entertain audiences first. Entertainment requires truth to character. Through that entertainment and that truth, a message may emerge.
Filmmakers driven by personal passion – witness the fate of Orson Welles – were spanked in Golden Age Hollywood. For your passion to reach audiences, people have to see it. Emilia Perez made a paltry $14 million, not even making back its production budget of $26 million. Queer brought in a negligible $4 million, a mere fraction of its production budget of $50 million. Megalopolis cost an estimated $136 million. Box office? $14 million.
If, in a movie’s opening scene, a white guy is married to a black woman and they have one Samoan son and one trans-identified daughter, I know that the filmmaker paid more attention to political demands than to storytelling quality. Aggressive overuse of the f-word and obese best friends are also red flags of low quality. Yes to diverse casts. No to crowbarring in diversity that defies storytelling authenticity.
In the 2025 romantic comedy You’re Cordially Invited, Will Ferrell plays an inept and un-hip white male patriarch. His daughter Jen is Indian. Her fiancée is mixed race. Twelve minutes in to the film, Jen’s friends, a chorus of obese and/or black young people, begin to chant the f-word and the b-word. As in “F—, the b—- is getting married.” White patriarch Ferrell reveals his allegedly “comic” lack of hipness by asking this “diverse” chorus not refer to his daughter as a b—-. The diverse cast, the f-word, and the obese, potty-mouthed best friends can’t save a movie with the inane premise of Cordially – a bride shows up for her own wedding which she never planned or paid for, and clumsily expects the wedding to take place anyway. No, just no.
In spite of these disappointments, I couldn’t shake that interview I heard with David Koepp. The NPR program Pop Culture Happy Hour reviewed Presence. NPR is always sure to bring gay reviewers for gay-themed films, and blacks for films about blacks. I’ve never heard them bring in working class whites or Catholics for films about either; some demographics exercise more clout than others.
For their review of Presence, a film featuring Asian-American actors, NPR summoned Walter Chaw. In a 2014 movie review, Chinese-American Chaw wrote, “I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful … the Chinese perfected racism.” Contrast that statement with his reaction to Presence. Presence’s cast is mostly Asian-American. Chaw doesn’t talk about the film. He talks about what he sees as its anti-Asian racism. Because of this alleged racism, Chaw calls Presence a “failed film.”
The haunted house in Presence is inhabited by three, living, Asian-Americans, a mother and two kids. Mother Rebecca pushes her high-school-aged son, Tyler, to academic success. Chaw says that the mother is a “stereotype of a dragon lady who’s very interested in academics … I’m like, oh, no. No, no, no, not me again … Not me having to say this again … She cares about the son more because Asians, you know, number one son.” This “stereotype” is “rotten.” “What are we missing here in the list of white guys writing a movie with diversity? And it probably begins with good intentions … It would totally be different if it was a white woman. But, you know, if it’s a Desi [Indian] woman, if it’s a Black woman, if it’s a Chinese woman … you got to be really so careful … why is it the only time I get to see Lucy Liu in a major production is she knows martial arts or she’s a dragon lady? Why is that? … that’s painful.”
There is, according to NPR, another problem with Presence. Pop Culture Happy Hour‘s hostess, Linda Holmes, sniffed at screenwriter Koepp. His success rubs Holmes the wrong way. Holmes says that Koepp is a “journeyman.” “Journeyman” is defined as a “worker who is reliable but not outstanding … a trained worker who is employed by someone else.” So, a man whose scripts have been behind films that have brought in billions of dollars worldwide is not “outstanding.” Koepp, Holmes says, is “a guy who knows how to write movies that get made.” His “script is serviceable.” Chaw says the script is “very conventional.”
NPR dismisses a movie because it was scripted by a successful writer who knows what he is doing and who makes films that please audiences? Sheesh. I realized that I had to overcome my hesitation and go see Presence.
Before I say anything else, let me say this. I liked Presence a lot. If you like intimate, slow, talky movies, you might like Presence. If you are going to see it, please stop reading now, because my review will reveal the film’s powerful, profound, and deeply moving twist ending.
Presence premiered at Sundance in 2024, and was released wide on January 24, 2025. Steven Soderbergh directed. Sixty-one-year-old Soderbergh first made a splash with Sex, Lies, and Videotape back in 1989. The Oceans heist movies, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Contagion, Magic Mike, were all very different, but they were all intelligent, entertaining, and box office successes. In addition to being an independent cinema darling and an artistic innovator, Soderbergh knows how to reach audiences. To get a sense of what Soderbergh can do with even conventional material, in this case two gorgeous people meeting in a bar, watch Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney in this scene from Out of Sight.
Presence stars Lucy Liu as Rebecca Payne, Chris Sullivan as her husband Chris, and Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as Chloe and Tyler, their daughter and son, both of whom are in high school. West Mulholland is Ryan, Tyler’s new friend. Natalie Woolams-Torres is Lisa, a medium, and Lucas Papaelias is Carl, Lisa’s husband. Julia Fox makes a brief appearance as Cece, a realtor. Presence was made on a tiny budget of $2 million; so far its box office is $8.3 million. Presence enjoys an 88% positive score from professional reviewers at RottenTomatoes.
Presence opens as someone – someone the viewer cannot see – explores an empty house. Plaintive piano music plays. The camera moves up and down stairs, and from room to room. Whoever is exploring this house seems confused. We, the audience, conclude this because the camera moves inquisitively and hesitantly. These movements seem to say, “What is this house? How did I get here? What am I supposed to be doing here?” Because we see only what the ghost sees, because the film is shot entirely from the ghost’s perspective, we the audience, become the ghost.
The ghost never leaves the house; almost the entire film takes place within the house’s walls. Shots are long, continuous takes. That is, the camera does not cut from shot to shot. A movie might have over a thousand cuts. Presence has only thirty-three. In between the long takes, the screen cuts to black. The length of time in each blackout indicates the length of time that has passed between cuts. A short blackout means little time has passed; a long blackout means weeks or months have passed.
The ghost watches from a window as a car pulls up outside. Cece, a realtor, offers a cheery hello to her clients, the Payne family. Tyler is on his phone. Chloe looks sad. The realtor apologizes that she has not “staged” the house, that is, she has not placed furniture and other accessories where they might otherwise be. The house is completely empty. There is, though, an antique silver nitrate mirror affixed to the wall in the living room.
Chris, the dad, voices concern. Isn’t it too soon for this big of a move, he asks his wife, Rebecca. “That’s life,” Rebecca says, dismissively. “No, that’s death,” Chris responds. Chloe has just lost two friends, Nadia and Heather, to apparent drug overdoses. Rebecca is focused on Tyler’s needs. The local school district will advance his academics and competitive swimming.
Chloe, as if guided, walks upstairs, and immediately approaches, and looks out, the very window from which the ghost had watched her family’s arrival.
The house had been painted in sunshine colors, yellow and melon. Chris orders painters to use Sherwin Williams Breezy, a pale gray-green shade. Only the living room, the room with the silver nitrate mirror, remains sunshine yellow.
Rebecca and Tyler converse alone. Rebecca is drinking. She holds Tyler’s hand. She tells him that from the moment she was pregnant with him, she knew her purpose in life. She has never felt as close to any other human being. Everything she does is for him. She acknowledges that she has gone too far, but it’s okay to go too far if you do it for someone you love, she says.
Chloe is upstairs in her room, the room where she looked out the window. A poster of Leda and the Swan decorates Chloe’s wall. She is crying alone. She senses a presence. She rises and attempts to follow it. Chloe calls out, “Nadia?” The ghost retreats and hides in Chloe’s closet, peaking out through the slats in the louvered closet door.
Chloe is reading on her bed. She goes to the bathroom. The ghost neatens up her bed, placing her books and pencil case on her desk. The pencil case zipper is open. Chloe emerges from the shower, sees the books, and is frightened. Chris comes to her room, sees her in a towel, and retreats.
Chris confers with Rebecca. Rebecca is typing on her laptop. Chris wants to get professional help for Chloe. Rebecca says, “She can’t take us all down with her.” Chris says, “I just want to fix this.” Tyler suggests testing Chloe for drugs. Take a strand of her hair. Get her to pee in a cup.
Chris is eating a packaged meal of some kind from a plastic tray.
Tyler and his new friend Ryan enter Chloe’s room and then go to Tyler’s room, featuring a poster of Michael Phelps. The ghost closes Chloe’s door.
Rebecca is deleting material from her computer. Chris asks her what she’s doing. She claims she has a virus. Rebecca talks about Tyler winning a swim meet. Chris says he has gotten the name of a therapist who might help Chloe.
Chris tells Tyler that he’s ordering burritos by phone. Do you want one? Tyler doesn’t answer. Chris orders a burrito for Tyler.
Chris is talking on his phone to a lawyer. He wants to know if a husband is legally liable for a spouse’s criminal activity. Then he asks, “What if the husband is legally separated from the wife?”
Ryan enters Chloe’s room. He sees that she has a photo of Nadia on her mirror. “She was my best friend,” she tells Ryan.
Ryan and Chloe lay on the bed. Ryan expresses concern for Chloe. No one else around Chloe wants to talk about death, or about her feelings, but Ryan will talk about it, and listen to her. Chloe says, “You fall into this hole. The walls are mud. You can’t get out.” Ryan strokes Chloe’s hair.
Chloe feels the ghost’s presence. “I think she’s here,” Chloe says. Impetuously, she kisses Ryan.
Ryan says he never feels in control of anything. He insists that Chloe will be in control of their interaction, and they will only go as far as she wants.
A shelf in Chloe’s closet crashes down. Chloe rises and approaches the closet. Suddenly she feels a puff of breath on her face.
At the dinner table, the family is together, but, again, they are eating take-out food. Tyler screams at Chloe. Ryan is “huge” at the new school. Being Ryan’s friend conveys status. A crazy sister might damage Tyler’s ascent. Chris berates Tyler. “There’s an excellent man in you and I’d like to meet him someday,” Chris says to his son. “It wouldn’t kill you to stand up for your sister.”
Rebecca, Chris, Tyler, and Chloe are sitting around one evening. Tyler is telling a story about how he and his friends pranked Simone, a girl at his new high school. They conned her out of a revealing photo, and shared the photo around the school. The girl has disappeared. Tyler is proud and laughing. Rebecca, in a flirtatious sounding voice, says that Tyler was “mean.” Chloe and Chris are disgusted.
The ghost jerks away from this scene, runs upstairs, and throws Tyler’s sports trophies into garbage cans. Witnessing this, the family can no longer deny what Chloe has long known. The house is haunted.
Chris phones Cece. Cece says she would have been required by law to report any deaths in the house prior to his purchase of it, but there were none. She says that her sister-in-law, Lisa, is a medium.
Lisa and her husband arrive. Lisa looks right into the camera; through this, we, the audience, recognize that Lisa is the real deal. She sees the ghost. She says that the presence is confused, is trying to figure the family out, and also trying to figure out why it is in this house. Lisa also says that ghosts experience time differently than do embodied mortals. Lisa is overcome by the emotional impact of this encounter with a ghost. Carl tells Chris that Lisa’s mediumship takes a toll on her, and she often can’t return to her day job after a session. Chris understands that Carl wants money. We, the audience, see that Chris thinks that Lisa is just a scam artist. Chris worries that by summoning Lisa, he has only made things worse.
The ghost is hiding in the closet, looking out through the slats in the louvered door. The ghost sees Chloe having sex with Ryan. The sight is blurred. The ghost looks away.
Chris and Chloe converse in her bedroom. Chris tells Chloe that he used not to get along with his mother because she was religious. He wanted to name Chloe “Blue.” He wanted a name that broke from the past. His mother was upset because he didn’t christen his daughter with a saint’s name, as is Catholic tradition. Chris compromised by giving Chloe “Blue” as a middle name.
As he matured, though, Chris came to realize that “there is mystery,” and he began to get along better with his mother. He realizes, he says, that Chloe is open to the mystery, and he respects that.
Chris and Rebecca leave on a business trip. Ryan arrives. He serves a spiked drink to Tyler. Tyler passes out on the couch in the living room, the room with the mirror, the one room in the house that has remained sunshine yellow.
Ryan goes upstairs to Chloe’s bedroom and serves her a spiked drink, as well. She also passes out. Ryan tells her that when he drugged Nadia and Heather, it sexually aroused him. Suddenly he had control. Ryan produces a roll of plastic wrap. He holds plastic wrap over Chloe’s nose and mouth. Ryan says that he knows that Chloe can hear him, but the drug has paralyzed her, so she cannot save herself. As he talks, he places the plastic wrap over Chloe’s nose and mouth, removes it, and replaces it. He is fascinated, he says, by how fragile is the separation between life and death. A thin film of plastic wrap can end a life.
The ghost runs downstairs to where Tyler is passed out on the couch. Living room lights flash on and off. Tyler rises from the couch, runs up to the room, and hurls himself at Ryan. Both young men fall through the window to their deaths on the pavement below.
A long cut to black, indicating that much time has passed. The house is, again, empty. Chris, Chloe, and Rebecca are preparing to leave forever. Rebecca says that before she leaves she wants to take a moment. Chloe and Chris tenderly tell her to take all the time she needs.
Rebecca stands, alone, then suddenly looks at the camera. For the first time, she is aware of the presence. She follows the presence into the living room, and stands in front of the mirror. She sees Tyler standing behind her. Rebecca suddenly realizes that Tyler had been the presence. His spirit violated the laws of time, as humans understand such laws, to return to rescue his sister from Ryan. Rebecca bursts into tears and falls to the floor. Chris and Chloe comfort her.
The presence leaves the house for the first time. We finally see the exterior. It’s a pleasant, spacious, suburban home. The exterior is painted sky blue with white trim. The camera moves up above the house; we understand that the presence is ascending, and leaving this dimension.
Is Presence a timeless masterpiece? It doesn’t have to be. It’s a well-honed machine by two professionals who know their craft. There isn’t a wasted line of dialogue or extraneous character. Edgar Allen Poe insisted on the “unity of effect” in a short story. If an author’s “initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed … In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency … is not to the one pre-established design.”
I don’t know if Soderbergh and Koepp intended the meanings I saw in Presence, but for me details did come together to support the film’s final message. For example, Chloe’s pencil case, seen when the presence first develops its ability to move things, is open. This open, oval-shaped pencil case is a feminine symbol, and clue as to the danger Chloe faces.
The empty house, before the Payne family came to live there, was painted in the colors of life: various shades of sunshine and healthy flesh. The Payne family arrived and immediately painted that over with “Breezy,” a gray-green shade, the color of necrotic flesh, the color of death in the Biblical book of Revelation. The only room that retains the sunshine color is the living room, where the ghost will revive Tyler so he can save his sister, and where Tyler will reveal his presence to his mother.
When the presence finally ascends to the afterlife, we see the entire house, which is painted sky blue and cloud white. Chris had named his daughter “Blue” in lieu of a saint’s name. He traded traditional Catholicism for a New Age reference to heaven’s traditional colors.
Why can Rebecca see the presence at the end of the movie? Because, as the film’s premise tells us, people who have suffered trauma are more open to the liminal spaces between life and death. Why could Chloe initially sense the presence but lose that ability? Because time had passed and she had gone to the counselor her father had found for her. She was very open to the presence in the beginning of the film, and the presence was initially able to save her from Ryan’s first attempt to harm her. As Chloe began to recover from the loss of her friends, she lost her sensitivity, and the presence could not save her from Ryan’s final assault. Also, as the blurred image and the camera turning away informed us, the presence was uncomfortable spying on Chloe when her relationship to Ryan progressed to sexual intercourse.
Presence contrasts two kinds of ascent, of status. Rebecca commits financial crime to advance her son; her son commits a cruel prank to earn points among bullies. These ascents are amoral and focused on public approval. Eventually, Tyler, like his mother, does something extreme for someone he loves. She commits crimes; he gives his life. He chooses an invisible self-sacrifice as the superior ascent, and he literally ascends to heaven. He sees himself in a mirror, not in the eyes of fellow high school bullies.
Even the Leda and the Swan reference – possibly – fits. Leda was a Spartan queen. Zeus took the form of a swan to have sex with her. In some tellings, Zeus raped Leda. Swans are semi-aquatic creatures, like swimmers. Was Ryan a swimmer like Tyler? I don’t remember, but this is the kind of movie that causes viewers to ask these questions.
I know women like Rebecca, who, even at home, are hammering away on their laptops. I know families where no one cooks, and meals are prepared by others and eaten from plastic or aluminum. A “homecooked meal” is a loving gesture. Not in the Payne household. I know men like Chris, dissatisfied in his marriage but unwilling to make the leap out of it. Men who surrender, inch by inch, till grabbing back their role as father feels revolutionary. As repugnant as Tyler’s prank is, I know that committing a vicious high school deed does not render a young person forever irredeemable. And I know girls like Chloe, surrounded by physical comforts but crying alone, and all too vulnerable to promiscuity as a poisoned escape from their pain.
If the presence could have revived anyone, it might have chosen to revive Chloe. Chloe could have fought for her own life against Ryan. But Tyler chose a very traditional, masculine act of chivalrous self-sacrifice. “It wouldn’t kill you to stand up for your sister just once,” Chris had said, earlier in the film. In fact, it did. “There’s an excellent man in you, and I’d like to meet him someday.” Chris got his wish.
Some viewers object to this plot twist. They valued Chloe as a character and despised Tyler. They wanted Chloe to be the protagonist at the end, and vanquish Ryan herself. See, for example, this essay. I’ve seen plenty of recent films where female characters vanquish male villains. I did not need that in Presence. Sometimes females are rescued by males, and that story deserves telling, too.
One of the features of Presence I like the most is that some are still debating exactly who the presence was. For me, it was clearly Tyler, but good cases are made for other options. See this essay and discussion below it.
Soderbergh has said, in interviews, that a guest at his house saw a presence in it. He thinks a woman who may have been murdered in his house by her daughter may be that ghost. Soderbergh got to wondering how ghosts feel about living humans inhabiting their space. Koepp says that his fatherly worries about his daughter inspired his script. These two skilled professionals took these inspirations and crafted a movie that reaches audiences.
The season’s awards-bait, critical-darling, auteur-passion-project films did not move me. While dealing with medical phone tree sadism, surgery, memories, and my own mortality, I needed a good movie. That movie turned out to be a minor, 85-minute film that NPR sneered at because the filmmakers were too professional, too white, too male, too old. Presence featured a sad girl who is thinking about death and living among people who don’t want to talk about her concerns, who think that talking about her concerns would be weird or inappropriate. Talking about death would interrupt their lives. “That’s life,” Rebecca says. “No, that’s death,” Chris replies. They are both correct.
For me, Presence’s spookiest, most evocative, and almost tear-jerking scene was the opening. A presence, unsure, tentative, but determined, investigates an empty house. Many of us have done that. We have entered an empty space and slowly but surely made it our nest, our home. We plant our favorite photos, furniture, knick-knacks. It soon smells like our favorite meals. We create memories of our sister’s fall on the kitchen floor, or the spot where baby took his first steps.
And then we move on. Slowly but surely, we discard, donate, or distribute our favorite belongings, things we thought we’d never part from. We open the windows wide and the fragrance of our last meal escapes. We realize that we are the only ones left who witnessed that event on that piece of carpet.
Moving into a new home, our new extension of our own skin, is like a new life. Leaving that home is practice for our own deaths.
My natal family of eight was the first to inhabit our tiny Cape Cod, and my brother Joe, the last member of my family to inhabit that house, died of cancer, while resting on the living room couch, almost seventy years later. Three of us died there. My mother, while I was holding her hand, died of cancer in my childhood bedroom. I could feel the pulse in her wrist escaping her body like a wild bird fleeing a cage. A fourth one of us was killed a mile away from that house; the house was packed with mourners for days.
I have to wonder if the deaths of half of the family members in and around that house did not seep something into the joists and mortices. Our multiple cats and dogs peed on the floor – not often – my mother was meticulously clean, and everyone, no doubt including pets, feared her – but surely Tramp or Pumpkin inscribed some signature, however slight, a Kilroy-was-here that outlived them and our habitation. I know Tramp left sound. In the weeks after he died, I kept hearing his toenails clicking against the concrete floor of the porch where we slept together on hot summer nights. Can’t a human soul perform the same feat of persistence as a cat marking its territory?
I dream of the house regularly. My entire family is there, and then my consciousness, in my sleep, as if tapping out a telegram to my subconscious, slips in and announces, ever so quietly, “Mike can’t be here. He was dead by the time Daddy got to be this old … Antoinette can’t be here … she’s gone …” My dutiful consciousness, even when I’m asleep, eliminates the entire cast of characters, except me. Waking up is hard. These dreams drive all my senses with the thrust of a kidnapper driving a getaway car. I can see the knots in the oak floor. I can feel the granny square Afghan over the back of the second-hand couch I will sleep on till an older brother moves out and there’s space for me in a bedroom. When I have these dreams, I wonder. Is some part of my soul back in that house? If so, do the current residents feel haunted?
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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