Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp are collaborating again, this time for a movie told from the POV of a ghost. It's a tiny production, filmed entirely in a suburban house, with each scene comprising a single long take. Like the recent "Nickel Boys," the whole film is shot from a first person perspective. Despite what the marketing might lead you to believe, this is not a traditional horror film. It's about a ghost, but a ghost who has to figure out its own identity and why it's trapped in this house, watching over the lives of a typical family of four.
For most of "Presence," events play out like a non-supernatural domestic drama. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) move into the house with their teenage children, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). The family dynamics are difficult. Chloe is mourning the loss of a friend. Rebekah is unsympathetic, heavily favoring her son Tyler, who is an insensitive jock. Chris is more empathetic, but often frustrated in his attempts to communicate with his wife and children. Tyler becomes friends with a boy named Ryan (West Mulholland), who becomes close with Chloe. All five of them start experiencing strange phenomena in the house as the ghost becomes more active.
"Presence" feels like the kind of experimental low-budget movie that a couple of promising first-time filmmakers would make. It's got a few big twists and some awkward dialogue that don't quite come off as well as I was hoping they would, and the first person camera takes some getting used to, especially when it starts whip-panning in some of the later scenes. Like many of Soderbergh's recent films, it feels like he's mostly interested in playing with the cinematic visual language - specifically the use of certain camera techniques and the first person perspective. Not all of these experiments have been very watchable or entertaining, but I thought that everything paid off in "Presence," especially the ending. And I really appreciate seeing Lucy Liu in a relatively straight dramatic film role for once. I really wish it happened more often.
On to "Love Me," which I'd been keeping an eye out for since it premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Brothers Andy and Sam Zuchero have made a romantic comedy about two AI - a weather buoy and a satellite - who gradually gain sentience after humanity goes extinct, and eventually develop a relationship with each other. It's extremely high concept, very experimental, and I don't think most of it works. However, it makes for a fascinating thinkpiece and I enjoyed watching the film come up with different ways to portray the different stages of Me (Kristen Stewart) and Iam (Steven Yeun) becoming more and more anthropomorphized over the passing aeons.
The biggest problem with "Love Me" is that it jumps into the romance before it establishes who Me and Iam are as characters, and blunders a lot of the character development. It also relies on tropes and meta commentary very heavily, and the fact that the film is self-aware about this doesn't help much. Me, the buoy, who eventually self-identifies as a girl, is initially the pursuer. She creates a fake persona for herself by borrowing heavily from the social media of a real couple, Deja and Liam. Her idea of being in a relationship is copying what she likes. This means endlessly acting out scenes from existing videos, repeating other people's words and actions. The message about performative online interactions couldn't be plainer. It takes some significant conflicts and self-discovery to get our two AI on the right track.
The visuals shift from screenlife text messaging and search engine results to virtual world animated avatars, to finally the live actors interacting physically in the last act. Frankly, none of it looks very good, but the attempt to piece all this together coherently is admirable in and of itself. I also do not believe Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun have any screen chemistry together at all, which may have been the point. In any case, this is a weird little movie, but innovative and earnestly trying new things, and the filmmakers deserve nothing but encouragement in their future endeavors.
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