Underwhelming Presence

Presence is a horror movie filmed from an entirely different perspective than typical. 

The movie opens with an empty house, cameras pan around from the perspective of what viewers are confused about at first, but turns out to be a spirit living in the home. The family viewing the home is interracial; mom and her two kids, Tyler and Chloe, are Asian, while the husband, Chris, is caucasian. They find the home charming and decide to call it their own.

The camera moves around the whole house, following anyone who enters, but always retreats to the closet in the daughter’s room at the end of the night. From the beginning, there was a sense of spirit in that room, causing even the construction team, called to paint the house distressed upon entering what would be Chloe’s room.

The spirit is very much attached to this room, but not maliciously. Thinking about any other horror movie based on spirits, often they torture new families moving into what they view as their home. In Presence, though, the spirit is fixated on Chloe and doing anything but terrorizing her. The first encounter they have consists of the ghost cleaning off her bed of clutter for her while she’s in the shower. Her textbooks close, pencils fly into their place, and everything finds its way back to its place on her desk. Chloe happens to catch the tail end of this and yelps, causing her father to charge in, but she soon calms down, more curious about what happened than anything. 

The spirit catches a lot of tension in the household. Mom is career-focused and pushing her son to do great things, while her daughter is drowning in the grief of losing her best friend, whom nobody other than Dad seems to care about. This causes a great divide in the household as the movie progresses. Some tension is released when the brother, Tyler, introduces a friend to Chloe. The friend takes a liking to her, lightening her mood for the time being. Chloe opens up to this friend about her grief and things she’s been through. Eventually, the pair grows close, becoming intimate in more ways than one.

The spirit does not much enjoy the relationship forming between the two and often does things such as knocking shelves down in the closet to scare them apart. After that incident, Chloe begins to open up to her family about sensing something or someone in the home, which tears them down the middle even more than before. Tyler thinks his sister is reaching for attention, Mom wants to ignore the issue entirely, while Dad, of course, is always on her side. 

The spirit shows anger when it comes to themes such as bullying. At one point, Tyler comes home telling his family about a prank they pulled on a girl at school, which causes the ghost to fly into a rage, destroying his bedroom. This is one of the breaking points for the family as they find themselves outside both scared to death and confused as to what just occurred in their home. Over time, this spirit interferes in Chloe’s life, saving her from bad situations more than once. 

In the end, the film is lackluster as nothing of suspense happens until just about the very end. I do understand by the end the message the movie is trying to send, but I don’t understand the choice to portray it within a horror film. Death, relationship abuse, potential divorce, sibling loss, and child loss are all themes, but a majority of them aren’t understood until the end, if even at all.