Sometimes Steven Soderbergh’s Prescence tested my patience… and then he’d pull off something that was pretty interesting. Even if half the film is made up of weird relationships and the ghost that still lingers here probably needed to be more proactive, I wound up liking the flick.

This is a first person haunted house movie… where the POV is always a ghost wandering around the house, occasionally – very occasionally – rattling its chains. The family that moves in are pretty average folk with their own drama llamas… plus ghost.

I like to think of this flick as Here… only more like there. And over there. And up the stairs. Its camera moves around the house but never leaves it… instead settling down to observe the family, much in the way Here did but without the random time skips.

My biggest problem (other than the ghost being very idle) is the really weird family dynamics. The mom loves her son a little uncomfortably, the son aggressively hates his sister, the dad hates his son, and the husband and wife hate each other… until they don’t? And then there’s a random best friend / boyfriend material who also makes some hairbrained choices. Plus sometimes the teen dialog is a little ‘how do you do, fellow kids’ levels of distraction.

To be fair to the boyfriend character, he gets the best turn in the film… it made me like the movie more realizing what it had been saying all along without saying it. Maybe I’m dense, but I thought it was an interesting turn that redeemed a lot of the random stuff in the flick.

I admire Steven Soderbergh for just deciding to make a haunted house flick one day. It’s exactly on brand. It’s a bit ponderous and it probably needs more actual ghost in its haunting… but it’s exactly what Soderbergh would make. So respect. Even if sometimes it tested my patience.

Score: 81