Presence is a poignant exploration of how grief, love, and regret can linger.
Presence was the biggest surprise of a movie I’ve seen in a long time. Leading up to its release, all I’ve heard were people complaining about how Neon chooses to advertise its horror movies, something along the lines of “not every horror movie should be advertised as the scariest movie ever; you saw what happened with Longlegs,” all the while Longlegs was the highest grossing indie horror movie in the last decade. Regardless, everyone was saying that Presence in particular was more of a family drama than horror.
Personally, I think those people have a very limited perception of what horror can be. While its first-person perspective gimmick, shot from the point of view of a ghost haunting a house, invites comparisons to Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature (2024) or David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2018), I think the closest thematic and emotional connection is to Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008).
Lake Mungo is yet another horror movie that has received middling reviews for “not being scary” due to its slow-pace and lack of traditional jumpscares or gore. Formatted as a found-footage mockumentary, it follows the Palmer family’s search for meaning after the death of sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer. They await and find ghosts, real and fake, contact mediums, try to solve the “mystery” of Alice’s life, but ultimately must make peace with the fact that she is gone. In the movie’s most famous moment, her family recovers a strange video in which Alice seemingly sees her own future corpse while on a trip to Lake Mungo. It’s a somber and gloomy depiction of the horror of being unseen, of a life unfulfilled
Presence flips this idea on its head, almost as if it is imagining what could have happened if Alice’s family had started searching for her while she was still alive. The story follows Chloe (Callina Liang), a young woman grieving the loss of her best friend, which has left her estranged from her brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) and emotionally distant from her mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu). Their father, Chris (Chris Sullivan), holds the family together as they move into a new house to start fresh. However, Chloe begins to witness supernatural phenomena driven by the ghost already haunting the place, our point-of-view character. This review will contain spoilers, so be careful if you’re thinking of seeing it!
From the very first scene of the movie, the ghost is imbued with confusion and shyness, retreating when anyone so much as turns in its direction and running back to hide in the closet when overwhelmed. It looks around the house it appeared in like it doesn’t recognize anything at all, draped in a sense of melancholia and helplessness. It only gains a sense of comfort and warmth when it discovers Chloe, following her through the house, tidying her books when she studies too much and growing aggravated when she shows interest in Ryan (West Mulholland), a boy it clearly distrusts. It watches her with a sense of tenderness, and you think that if it could reach out and comfort her in her times of grief, it would; it yearns to.
As the story progresses, Ryan’s true intentions become more and more clear through his increasingly violent and predatory behavior. In one of its few moments of deliberate action, the ghost foils his attempt to drug Chloe by knocking over the drink he brought her. It also reveals itself to the family in other ways, ransacking Tyler’s room in a fit of rage after he makes a sexist comment about a girl in his class.
The family soon learns through a medium that the ghost is confused and stuck in time, perhaps from the future. This moment—the ghost’s confusion, its anxiety of being seen, the fact that it is a ghost from a death that has not yet happened—is what brings about the sense of dread that permeates the rest of the movie, especially as Ryan’s face pops up again and again. Like when Alice Palmer saw her own bloated corpse on the lake, you are hit with this sense of inevitability: something terrible is on the horizon, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It weighs heavy on your shoulders, especially when Ryan comes over again while Chloe’s parents are out, promising to get Tyler “out of the way” so they can spend some time alone together.
The movie spells out what is coming, and the ghost watches, unable to intervene, as Ryan drugs Tyler’s drink. It stares, looks right at it, anger and helplessness more pronounced than ever before as Tyler falls asleep and Ryan heads upstairs. The inevitability is horrible, nearly unbearable to watch, but you must.
Chloe falls unconscious soon enough, and Ryan begins to rant at her about control—I gave you control, and now I’m taking it back—and admits that he is responsible for the death of Chloe’s friends. He begins to taunt her by covering her mouth with plastic wrap and pulling it away right before she runs out of breath, over and over and over, and the ghost rushes downstairs, screaming through the void as much as it can, and it succeeds, waking Tyler.
Tyler rushes upstairs and shoves Ryan off of Chloe, and the fight between the two leads to them both falling out of the window and dying, forcing the viewer to the realization that it was Tyler, Chloe’s brother, who has been the ghost all along.
This realization completely changes how we view the events of the rest of the movie; subconsciously, the ghost knew what Ryan was going to do, so every glare, every interruption, every moment it stood there and watched Chloe breathe, now is colored by a sinking sense of regret. The two siblings never got along while Tyler was alive, to the point where their father asked Tyler something along the lines of: “Would it kill you to stand up for your sister for once?”
At the end of the movie, Chloe is no longer able to see the ghost, but her mother is. She follows it to the mirror in the living room and sees Tyler’s reflection standing there. She collapses in a moment of grief: “It’s your brother!” She cries. “He came back to save you!”
When watching this movie, I believe that you are forced to feel those very same feelings that Alice felt seeing her own ghost for the first time: the dread, the hopelessness, the unavoidable and imminent presence of death, right in front of you. You feel it getting closer, and closer, and closer in what was at first at crawl that quickly becomes a sprint. The moment of climax is quick, barely ten seconds long, when Tyler crashes through the door and knocks himself and Ryan out of the window, and it hits like a punch to the gut: realization and catharsis and relief and terror all at once. It’s a brilliant moment. The tension is gone but the tragedy remains, as loud and as painful as ever.
The movies I’ve always found most horrifying are those about a life left unlived, unseen by anyone. Understanding is a feeling I value above all else—I’ve previously stated that it’s what I love about film, the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes—and this movie gave it to me on a silver platter. It’s almost a more kindhearted version of Lake Mungo; where Alice died alone, unseen by anyone, unable to find her purpose let alone fulfill it, Tyler was able to change the past. He was able to save his sister, and his family was allowed to say goodbye. Chloe was seen and understood by her family, beautiful and tragic all at once.
Technically, the movie is outstanding. The first-person perspective captures the ghost’s emotions—its warmth, anger, and confusion—with an aching clarity. The score is operatic and evocative, amplifying the tension and sorrow. The one-location setup feels natural thanks to a screenplay that keeps the characters moving and interacting in believable ways. While some of the dialogue—particularly Ryan’s rants and Chloe’s introspections—can feel overwrought, it fits their characters and the heightened emotional tone of the story.
All in all, I wept at this movie. It was everything that always makes me cry, really: the horror of Lake Mungo—which is, to me, the scariest movie of all time—and the addition of a fraught sibling dynamic. I definitely see why some people wouldn’t like this, and it will probably be the same crowd of people who didn’t like Lake Mungo, wishing for more gore and scares and death, and that’s fair enough. To each their own. But for anyone willing to sit with its quiet, deliberate pace, I can’t recommend this movie enough.
★★★★★
9.5 out of 10
Go see Presence in theaters today!
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