PRESENCE: IT HARBOURS VIEWS : FIVE IN SEASON DOUBLE PASSES

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It harbours views.

It’s there before the family moves in.

It witnesses the family’s most intimate, inharmonious, uncomfortable moments.

It navigates the family’s new house at supernatural speed.

It pays unusual attention to Chloe, the teenage girl who’s neither her mother’s nor her brother’s favourite, but a definite daddy’s girl.

It wants, it needs, something. And as time goes on, the presence pieces together how it might accomplish its goal.

PRESENCE is an unusual, unnerving, and surprisingly emotional thriller from writer David Koepp and director Steven Soderbergh.

Quite brilliantly conceived as point of view by the presence, the film sweeps up staircases, roams through rooms, wanders through windows, haunting halls, turning closets into cubbyholes, projecting a protective presence rather than a predatory one, although it is not without its poltergeist proclivities.

This is a supernatural tale that is actually very natural, a spectral perspective on family life, the fractures and the fissures, the playing of favourites, the challenges of parenting.

It also dwells in the contemporary debate of consent, coercion, and cracked masculinity.

PRESENCE basks in a visual virtuosity, a fabulously fluid film in both technique and narrative. Both director and writer are in perfect sync and at the top of their game.

PRESENCE breathes new life and reanimates the haunted house picture creating new tropes from old. The characters are all under a spectral surveillance, an eerie eavesdropping, where secrets and indiscretions are hauntingly hinted at.

The cast is uniformly fine, with Chris Sullivan as Chris, the hassled husband and dedicated dad particularly affecting and empathetic and Zack Ryan’s score is brilliantly evocative.

PRESENCE presents an unsettling, spooky experience, a pinch of the paranormal within very real parameters, a sequence of unease that’s palpable.

SYDNEY ARTS GUIDE HAS  FIVE IN SEASON DOUBLE PASSES TO GIVE AWAY TO SEE THIS FINE FILM. EMAIL editor.sydneyartsguide@gmail.com wiih PRESENCE PROMOTION in the subject heading. Winners will be advised by email, and passes emailed across.

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