The last fifteen minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence do not live up to their cathartic potential. Up to this anticlimactic finale, the supernatural family drama promises a lot—its story gets progressively tenser through an increasingly charged conflict between the Presence, a spirit that dwells in an unoccupied suburban house, and the Paynes, a troubled family of four who move into the house and become tormented by the Presence.
The spirit is the movie’s viewpoint character, which is an ingenious twist on the haunted house genre. Since we witness the world from the Presence’s point of view, we develop a keen curiosity for its sinister actions. Why does it grow violently protective of Chloe, the younger daughter grieving the mysterious death of her friend Nadia? Is it going to hurt Tyler, the douchebag brother who dismisses Chloe’s feelings? Why doesn’t it like Ryan, Tyler’s fratty emo friend who’s interested in Chloe? Does it know something we don’t about the fractured relationship between Rebekah and Chris, the frigid mother and the sensitive father? All thrilling questions—only sort of answered by the time the movie wraps up.
Here’s where things go sideways. After Rebekah and Chris leave for a business trip, Ryan comes to the house and drugs both Tyler and Chloe and then tries to kill Chloe. The Presence wakes up drugged Tyler, who then runs to Chloe’s room and tackles Ryan, but this climactic battle is over before it even starts, because both Tyler and Ryan fall through Chloe’s bedroom window and die. The grieving Paynes decide to move out after this incident. In the last scene, the Presence reveals itself in the mirror to Rebekah, who breaks down once she realizes that the Presence is actually the ghost of dead Tyler, who was not able to leave this world until he saved Chloe from Ryan.
The scene is meant to be a gratifying revelation but in this alleged catharsis lurks a loop that breaks the brain. Namely, Tyler’s ghost comes to life after Tyler saves Chloe, but Tyler saves Chloe only after Tyler’s ghost tells him to, which means Tyler’s ghost must come to life before Tyler saves Chloe. It’s a bootstrap paradox that falls short not because it’s an illegitimate plot device but because it’s an ineffective way to create emotional payoff. It sells us a resolution in which the effect precedes the cause, in which we’re supposed to retroactively grow to care for the alive douchebag Tyler after we get swept off our feet by the dead remorseful Tyler.
To paper over this tortuous logic, the movie introduces the oracle archetype: Lisa, a medium who visits the Paynes and confirms that some sort of spirit is in the house. She tells the family that “[time] doesn’t work the same way for [the Presence]. Past, present can be happening at the same time, so it doesn’t even know when it is.”
The idea here, it seems, is that we accept nonlinear time as an explanation and just go with it, because we did the same for many other movies which distorted our perception of time, like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. But this analogy is not quite right. In Arrival, Louise Banks sees that time is circular once she learns the palindromic language of the heptapods, but she never time travels to affect the course of her actions. The causality is never broken; it’s in fact upheld.
There also seems to be a faint influence of the multiverse theory in Tyler’s character arc. Perhaps the Presence has come from another universe, not the future (though the future is curiously absent from Lisa’s explanation)? If that’s the case, is Tyler’s ghost then from a universe in which Chloe died and in which Tyler spent the rest of his life without a sister and is therefore trying to prevent that outcome in this universe? Sure, that’s a fine explanation, but then Tyler can’t “[come] back to save [Chloe]”—which is what Rebekah says when she realizes the Presence is the ghost of Tyler—because the other Tyler was never in this universe to begin with.
Maybe this all sounds fastidious, so let’s ignore the vexing time warp for a moment. Inconsistencies still abound. Why does Chloe, who clearly feels and acknowledges the Presence, not heed its blatantly obvious warnings about Ryan? Why can the Presence furiously shake Tyler’s room and neatly arrange Chloe’s books but can’t do anything to Ryan when he drugs Chloe? Why does Chris—the attuned and loving father who believes Chloe when she says the Presence is in the house—go on a business trip with Rebekah and leave the kids alone with the ominous spirit?
None of these plot holes are unsolvable, but they require more airtime—time for timelines to disentangle and motivations to unravel. Presence, for some reason, insists on not giving that coverage. It compresses a story that could have breathed as a multi-episode series into an unapologetically compact film with a brisk eighty-five-minute runtime. What the movie leaves us with, in the end, are desultory answers to questions that clamor for discipline and precision.