Presence

The Payne family moves into a new house. It’s supposed to be a new opening – in the marriage of Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris tension is growing, connected to the woman’s engaging work as well as the fact she doesn’t know how to support her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who tries to cope with her best friend’s death. The son Tyler, a talented swimmer, is also under pressure as his mother is counting on his career to take off. Yet they are not alone: a mysterious presence sensed by Chloe is also there and makes itself more and more tangible. The author’s version of a ghost story by the legend of American independent cinema Steven Soderbergh plays with the audience’s expectations and genre conventions. The director makes us follow the characters’ actions from the perspective of… the being which haunts the family. Long camera movements that track the characters throughout the house, along with limiting the editing cuts to just the breaks between individual scenes, create an eerie atmosphere in which this melodramatic-at-heart story about the breakdown of relationships, loneliness, and lack of mutual understanding unfolds at slow pace.