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.