Presence (2024)

Premise: Lucy Liu’s family moves to this bigass house that has a catch: it’s haunted by this POV ghost that is streaming everything they do, more or less. Something like that. Like, the movie is completely filmed from a first person perspective where you ARE the ghost and you fly around and do cool ghost stuff like, uhm, flying around the house and listening in to conversations, I suppose.
Under 90 minutes? Yup, around 85 minutes
Do they say the title? Yes! They even hesitate a little before saying the word so that’s good.

One sentence review: They are selling this as if it was a horror movie but it’s definitely not, is it the movie’s fault if the poster and reveal trailer let you think it’s a completely different genre?
Rating: When things like this happen, where the marketing is very misleading (even though I barely follow that at all!), I tend to go “hm”. I’m sure someone at that department was rubbing their hands thinking about all the horror hounds that would try to watch this as soon as possible, but on the other hand I think the writer must not be supper happy when their psychological drama is marketed as a spooooooky thing.
There are some genuinely neat things going on here that make you wonder how they filmed some scenes, some nice touches with the acting here and there. The plot is basically paper thin and it does nothing you haven’t seen before, but yeah. I sort of liked the movie but I was also disappointed for reasons that weren’t its fault. That said, that’s kind of another problem - if it had gone for spooky/unsettling, there are movies that do this WAY better even though they don’t have the first person point of view gimmick.
A simple way to improve it: I guess it’s the wrong movie for that but I really think it could dare to be scary, or at least spooky. Since we cannot have that, I’ll default to the usual comment “this would have been a really cool short”.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Though well-received at the Sundance Film Festival, some viewers walked out due to its intensity. One person said, “I cannot take this stress so late at night.”

Hahaha come on, that’s almost “x people that totally were not plants FAINTED” levels of cheesy PR moves…