Presence (2024)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. In the chaos of the early part of this year, I missed it in theaters* during its original run, and it’s been bouncing around the Beyond the Cabin in the Woods schedule all year.

Did I Like It: For the first few minutes, I was prepared to not like it at all. An entire movie from the fish-eye lens POV of a ghost. Like the Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) of the Paranormal Activity franchise?

All right, that sounds terrific. I found the whole thing haunting in a sad way (perhaps we should call that “haunting with a small h”?) as it proceeded.

And then the ball drops, and…

Well, I think a spoiler alert—not customary in these reviews—is probably warranted here.

You good? Okay.

The ghost can travel through time, it appears. Indeed, one of the human characters is the ghost. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since watching it. If I had Soderbergh here, I’m sure he would insist that the ghost was always, is always, and would always be the Tyler (Maday), the son of the Payne family who moves into the house**. That’s the straight ahead interpretation of the film from its opening moments to its close.

However.

What if that isn’t the case? My personal head canon is that as we watch the film, the presence is actually the daughter, Chloe (Liang). As the plot unfurls, she begs for deliverance from her grim fate from anyone who will list, including her passed-out brother. Tyler meets the challenge, leaps to his death, and then becomes the Presence just in time for Lucy Liu to let America know she wouldn’t mind a few awards, if anybody has some lying around.

The film as presented seems to make us want to think that the Presence is able to move on to whatever is next after deeply upsetting their mother, but wouldn’t this all lead to a recursive plot loop, where Tyler wants to make amends for his own demise, only to have Chloe perish and then want to change things, over and over again, ad infinitum?

If God was ever terribly interested in punishing me for all eternity, a loop like that might be the ticket.

*But somehow made a point to catch Black Bag (2025). Weird.

**Honestly, if the human desire to lust after too-good-to-be-true real estate deals, the entire horror genre would collapse in on itself.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Sonny Chiba

Have I Seen it Before: I wouldn’t say kung fu movies are a mainstay in my movie watching diet, so the prospect of this one didn’t insist on itself way-back-when. On spec, it was the film which inspired every brain-dead fool on my dorm floor to buy and display cheap samurai swords. Taken solely as the sum total of its parts the film should be irritating. And yet, I can’t recall a movie winning me over faster than when this one mentioned an old Klingon proverb in its opening seconds.

Did I Like It: That last remark I made really should say it all. Is there anyone who can bake together disparate parts that might not have been very good on their own—and certainly have no business going together—into a package so ceaselessly entertaining? The unflinching violence of the fights—which, surely, may not be to everyones taste—is one thing, but I’m really here for the little things. How can one not like a movie that injects a club owner who looks like Charlie Brown just for the joy of it?

And this isn’t even a complete movie, just the flashier parts Miramax would let Tarantino put forward, before the more introspective and emotional Kill Bill — Volume 2 (2004). It jumps around—hardly new for Tarantino—offers no real sense of catharsis at the end, and only holds itself together through the use of voice over narration. Honestly, if any other filmmaker had handled the same material or themes, the end result would have been the most irritating movie of all time.

Maybe I need to give all of these things another chance. I look at the Origin of O-Ren and wonder if I’ve been spending my whole life being wrong about Anime. For my money, that takeaway—the desire to steep oneself in the ingredients Tarantino has used—is the best possible feeling after one of his movies. That he has me even marginally interested in anime is a feat at which decades worth of friends have steadfastly failed.