Edition #052: Presence [Guest Post]

It’s all your call

Father of the year award goes to... Chris Sullivan as Chris in Presence (2024). A few of his sweeter scenes very nearly healed my inner child, thank you very much.

But don’t watch this movie for the fathering. (And definitely don’t watch it for the mothering, or the boyfriending). Watch it for the haunting!

Presence is an intimate, quietly heartbreaking Soderbergh film that shows a family tragedy from the perspective of a ghost that is doing its best to stop it.

It’s not necessarily a new story, but it’s a tender one, with an entirely fresh form. I recommend you watch “Presence” at home, in bed, on your laptop, with your closet open just a crack, and let me know how you sleep.

What’s the deal?

The Payne family moves into a new house. Their daughter, Chloe, senses a presence. In fact, a lot of people do. Chloe’s friend Nadia died recently, and Chloe thinks it might be her.

The haunting escalates, and the Payne family brings in a medium to suss it out. The medium casually mentions that the presence may be experiencing time “non-linearly.” Hmm...

Chloe’s brother Tyler brings his friend Ryan home, and Ryan cozies up to Chloe. But Ryan sucks. You can tell by how blond and polite he is. The Payne parents go out and Tyler has Ryan over. Ryan drugs both siblings and then tries to kill Chloe.

It turns out, Ryan is a fledgling serial killer. He killed Nadia and framed it as an overdose, and now he’s going to do the same to Chloe.

But the presence rouses Tyler and he is able to save Chloe’s life, pushing Ryan out the window. Tyler and Ryan both die.

Later: the (remaining) Payne family is moving out of the house. Mom (Lucy Liu) looks in a mirror and sees her son standing behind her. She cries out, saying that Tyler came back as a ghost to save Chloe.

Now, I don’t know why Julia Fox was their realtor. I don’t know what the mom does for work or why there is a plot line about her white collar crimes.

But I guess we’re supposed to assume that Tyler was the ghost all along, and I will say that Lucy Liu gives one of the better “THAT’S MY BOY” performances, strongly rivaling Amos Diggory’s in Goblet of Fire.

Guest post: Andrew Truong can’t stop thinking about...

Andrew Truong is a film critic and pop-up chef based in New York. Most of his writing can be found on his newsletter, Buttered Popcorn. His work has also appeared in Reverse Shot and a couple great zines.

There may have been a ghost floating around, but for this viewer, the scariest thing about this movie was seeing an Asian family wear shoes inside the house.

Most films lean on close-ups and medium shots, which tend to keep a character’s footwear conveniently out of frame. But their presence in this film is unavoidable, thanks to the wide angles of its first-poltergeist perspective.

My fellow yellows know the discomfort that arises whenever someone walks into their home without shedding their gross outdoor shoes, and that extends to cinematic depictions.

Asian people are not a monolith when it comes to our in-home footwear preferences, but for most of us it’s a pretty ironclad rule. Seeing Lucy Liu of all people violate this tradition was especially triggering. I’ve tried to figure out why her character would do such a thing.

I briefly considered that Rebekah could be an adoptee but she’s enough of a tiger mom that this seems unlikely. She is clearly the dominant partner in her marriage with Chris, who is white. Maybe she ceded the no-shoes thing just to give him a small win in an otherwise lopsided domestic power dynamic. Or the character belongs to a family that has lived in the US for generations, and not shedding indoor shoes was the price of assimilation.

But the most likely explanation for why Lucy Liu and her family would wear shoes indoors is far more practical.

During filming, the house in Presence wasn’t really a house, but a film set. There would have been a lot of people running around: grips, boom operators, set dressers, not to mention Soderbergh operating the camera.

Workplace safety regulations tend to require closed-toe shoes. Walking around barefoot or in socks in such an environment would have been quite unhygienic. In such a situation, it would be more Asian to keep your feet clean.

The script doesn’t require its characters to be of any particular race. That usually defaults to white, so kudos to Soderbergh for casting Liu in this role, which subsequently provided an opportunity for the young newcomers who play her kids. But colorblind casting comes at the cost of cultural specificity. Into that vacuum, a viewer will project their own stereotypes, which may conflict with the director’s well-meaning vision.

But the other shoe has dropped. One year after Presence was released, Lucy Liu returned to the big screen with Rosemead, a tragic drama involving a different kind of haunting. The screenwriter, director, and lead producer are all Asian American, and the film’s depiction of a Taiwanese immigrant community in Southern California is as dead-on as you will ever find. For starters, no one wears shoes in the house.

The only thing to fear is feet itself,

Andrew Truong for Horrorshow Jane

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