This article contains spoilers For Mike Flanagan’s “Presence” and “The Hail Hill House”.
Going to the other side and witnessing things from a ghostly plane is not new in the kind of horror. Films like “Haunter”, “the others” and “the sixth sense”, to name only a few, all offered spectators an overview of the beyond. The new horror film of director Steven Soderbergh, “presence” (consult our criticism here) offers another type of supernatural experience, while we are looking all the story from a paranormal point of view in the first person, putting Standard a ghost which only reveals itself after a death in the final act.
At the start of “presence”, a medium visiting the house explains that the beyond does not follow the same rules of time as ours and that the mind does not know who they are or when they exist. This creates the turn according to which the ghost is, in fact, Tyler Payne (Eddy Maday), the eldest of the family who falls to death while protecting his sister, apparently being before her disappearance to haunt the family until that it happens. moment. It is a daring turn and it is better not to dwell on it.
That said, even with its assets, it is difficult to look at “presence” without recalling the spectrum known as the lady with a curved neck in “The Haunting of Hill House”, which employs similar rules much more effectively. This is largely due to the ghosts in question and their relations with the living who are frightened.
The Tyler’s Tour in martyr does not correspond to the story, unlike the lady with a curved neck and Nell Crain.
Fans of Mike Flanagan (or Flanafans) will surely remember the moment when they discovered that the lady with a curved neck, who had haunted Nell Crain (Victoria Pedretti) all her life in “The Haunting of Hill House”, was actually Eleanor . “Nell” fear herself. For decades, the emblematic ghost of one of the best shows in Flanagan launched a wild time loop in its adaptation of the history of classical horror and that worked wonderfully, adding to the tragedy of Nell’s life, which continued until death. In the case of “presence”, however, the turn does not seem to be deserved, mainly because the character who becomes a ghost is portrayed as a fool from the start.
Tyler is the beloved and arrogant son who is only raised by his mother’s obsession for his success. If even a slight emotional bond had been rebuilt between him and his sister in mourning but neglected, Chloé (Callina Liang), the transformation of him into a ghost haunting his family would have resonated. The allusions to an attentive big brother who was even involved in all his family could have made the scenario credible. Instead, it is a precipitated revelation which simply seems to settle the details of the film. Perhaps if Chloé had died, taking her attacker with her to become the mind, it would have been a more appropriate conclusion than that which we received, mainly because there is no real resolution for the family who really deserved one.
The family in the presence is a real payne
The Payne family is damaged before even setting their feet in their new haunted house. Not only Chris (Chris Sullivan) plans to divorce his shady wife who does business, but Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is not content to choose a favorite child in Tyler, but maintains with him a disgusting limit relationship. This undoubtedly leaves Chloé at the center of the film: a ghost in his own house, protected by his father but not benefiting from almost any affection from his mother.
None of this is even resolved at a distance when the credits arrive, even after the mind has literally rocked the house when Tyler expresses his denial of the experience of his sister. If there had been a single scene where they had made amends, or where Liu’s cold mother had warmed up with her daughter before the unexpected death of her son, the punch she hopes to receive would have left a mark. The one who echoed the emotional notes of Nell’s revelation in “The Haunting of Hill House” when she finally realized that what had haunted her throughout her life was a deadly vision of his destiny. During a projection of the Beyond Fest in the presence of BJ Colangelo de /film, Flanagan also confirmed that the Australian ghost film “Lake Mungo” was a huge source of inspiration for “The Haunting of Hill House”, and the most Great fear of the film was a direct influence on the terror of Nell.
In the end, “presence”, based on the principle of an observer keeping his distances until it was absolutely necessary, needed a human touch to succeed in its landing. Instead, all that makes us want is to go back to Hill House or make a trip to Lake Mungo and see how a really terrifying temporal twist occurs.
