"Presence" - Review

A family move into a house. But something is awry.

Yeah, I'm not sucking Soderbergh's Steven on this one.
A real misfire. It has an interesting central gimmick of being told from the perspective of the ghost haunting the house, but instantly ruins it with rapid-fire cuts to black which are jarring and take one out of the affair completely. It leans more towards a family drama, with Lucy Liu (I like her) playing mother to a prick son (Eddy Maday) and a daughter (Callina Liang) attempting to get over the death of a friend from a drug overdose; only the way it's written is poor enough that for 40 minutes of its 90 minute runtime I was under the impression that the dead girl was her sister. Oh, and I didn't know that a character had been breaking the law until looking this movie up afterwards (there is a phone call where the father asks theoreticals to a lawyer friend of his, but I assumed that it was he who had done something wrong - only that's my fault because the fucking film implied that it was him. Yet it doesn't matter, for nothing hints at it or leads us to know what it is, because it also never comes back and we don't know what either of these characters are or do for a living). Chris Sullivan makes an impact as the genuinely devoted father telling his prick son to stop being a prick; but the drama is obtuse and underdeveloped: the trick the makers are aiming for seems to be one of having the story be told in the periphery, and witnessed by the ghost, rather than a conventional tale. But the stuff which is present here is anemic, underdeveloped and would have been better served by a more traditional execution, ironically: the characters dancing around it would be fine, letting us read between the lines and have an uncomfortable kitchen sink drama/horror in the vein of "45 Years" or "Hereditary".
So the horror angle will have to compensate, but instead lacks any atmosphere (hampered immensely by the aforementioned errant scissors of the editing room) or build up, and is as weak as the family drama.
When the script starts bringing in time travelling ghosts, I immediately clocked out, and thus its villain (a budget Lucas Till) in the form of a serial killer love interest with the charm of a half-eaten wolf scrotum (making his initial courtship of the daughter as compelling as my fucking blog) fell flatter than a birthday at Jeffrey Epstein's house. It's intriguing premise deserves a far superior movie, and Chris Sullivan's performance deserves an IMMENSELY better film.