Presence 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

The family moves into a suburban home and soon realizes: they are not alone here.

User Review

A family moves into a new house - mom, dad and teenage children: a son and a daughter. They all have their own problems: mom is doing something illegal at work, dad is thinking of getting a divorce, son is being bullied by a classmate, and daughter is depressed about the death of her friend. And there's a ghost in the house, and he has problems too - he knows something, but he can't interfere in the lives of the living....

If I didn't know in advance that there is a ghost in the plot of Steven Soderbergh's new movie, I probably wouldn't have guessed it until the twentieth minute (when it starts moving objects for the first time). Because the ghost behaves like a camera. Like a wide-angle camera. Like a wide-angle camera operated by Steven Soderbergh. Because absolutely any movie is a story shot by a camera that the actors “don't notice” - we move along with it, shamelessly looking at the characters, evaluating them, empathizing or being horrified. The camera becomes us. The ghost is us. And from this point of view, the ghost-camera in “Presence” does not contain such a great novelty - and it does not violate the rules of physics - it does not penetrate through walls, walks on stairs. Yes, in some places the camera “behaves” differently from the way we are used to peeking at movie life - it tries to “escape” from direct gazes, shy to peek at other people's sex, and in some places it clearly starts to get nervous, fuss, literally “bang its forehead” against careless housemates (if the ghost had a forehead) - about the same way ghostly Patrick Swayze tried to get through to Demi Moore in “Ghost”.

Curiously, this approach (shooting on behalf of a dangerous entity) has recently already been in our movie theaters - I mean “Undead”, where the viewer was invited to watch the massacre in the woods from the point of view of an unkillable maniac. But if we remember the 1975 classic “Jaws”, the main attraction there worked the same way - we “see” the heroes (and victims) through the eyes of a camera shark (though Spielberg went for it mainly because the mechanical shark kept breaking down).

So what do we have left in the story besides this kind of peek-a-boo method? What remains is life - the ordinary (seemingly) lives of the characters with their own cockroaches, quarrels, and secrets. Mom loves her son better (who is a naughty boy and is not ashamed to tell how he bullies the victims of bullying). Dad is closer to the daughter, who feels the presence of the ghost better than anyone else. Mom is hiding something from Dad. Dad is hiding something from Mom. Before the viewer realizes who exactly poses a danger to the heroes (the ghost is not idly hanging around the house), he will have to follow several plots at once, not all of which will be completed. It's not exactly good from a dramaturgical point of view, but isn't that how our lives work?

And while the plot made the characters feel someone else's presence, it was someone else's absence that kept me busy the entire movie. It wasn't until the third act, when evil showed its face, that I realized who I was missing. David Lynch. The loss is too fresh, and Lynch was too filigree in his ability to play with this kind of subject matter - to build up a vague unease in the air, a constant sense of impropriety, illogic, anxiety. Soderbergh has it all, but where Lynch drew an ornate zigzag, Soderbergh draws a straight line almost ruler by ruler. His mystical entities are logical and pragmatic, evil is commonplace and banal, and even the pinching ending is exactly as one would imagine it to be. Does that make Presence a bad or uninteresting movie? Not at all. But I would have liked more mystery and madness from a story told (or rather, shown) on behalf of a ghost.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (84.2 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1

Info Audio

#English: Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos 7.1
#English: Dolby Digital 5.1

Info Subtitles