DVD Review: The Presence
Review by Annie Riordan
Once upon a time, there was a cabin in the woods on the edge of a lonely lake, a pretty woman with pretty hair and a dark past, and a ghost.
Fuck. Again?
Granted, the pretty woman with the pretty hair is Oscar Winner Mira Sorvino, and the cabin in question is beautifully shot to the point of being almost Kubrickian (with the slightest nod in the general direction of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead POV-cam), but it’s like putting a fancy wooden frame around a reproduction of Dogs Playing Poker: no one is going to mistake it for a Van Gogh, no matter how prettily it’s presented.
Mira plays the unnamed pretty girl, who has come to the cabin where she spent many a happy summer with her grandmother as a child. Ostensibly, she has some writing work to do, although who she works for and exactly what she does is never revealed. But there is, of course, an ulterior motive lurking just below her cool blonde exterior. Her trip to the cabin is also an attempt to put some distance between herself and her doting boyfriend, as well as an unconscious desire to deal with her dark past. Unfortunately, someone has beaten her to the cabin: the pallid ghost of a grim looking young man, starkly visible to us but unseen and (mostly) unsensed by Mira. He watches her with an unblinking, unnerving intensity, never speaking. Actually, for the first twenty minutes or so, no one speaks at all. The stressful silence is only anti-climatically shattered when Mr. Browman (the only character with a name) shows up on his motorboat with a grocery delivery. Que the Charon references.
After a day or two of watching Mira eat alone, listen to warped jazz records and pee in a rickety old outhouse that keeps being inexplicably dive bombed by Kamikaze sparrows, the boyfriend shows up, uninvited, unannounced, bursting in upon Mira just as she’s starting to realize that something weird is going on in the house.
Long story short: her boyfriend loves her madly and wants to marry her. Mira, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, is having a great deal of trouble trusting anyone enough to commit to them permanently. Our ghost watches silently, unable to take part in the unfolding drama playing out before him…until he realizes that he’s not the only presence in the house. There’s another one, a meaner, nastier, much more powerful entity who is not just hell bent on destroying Mira and her well-meaning (but slightly too clingy) boyfriend, but is determined to get the ghost to assist him in his evil plans.
The good news is that Tony Curran plays the mean, nasty spirit, and he does quite an admirable job of covering up his strong Scottish accent with a passable American one, only slipping up on his R’s no more than twice. I love Tony Curran. I’ve loved him since The 13th Warrior. I put up with two hours of unbearable Dennis Quaid smarminess (Flight of the Phoenix remake) and the utter ridiculousness of Underworld: Evolution (which could have been Twilight with just a smidge more glitter) just to watch him. Again, given a bony role in another mediocre movie, he does the best he can with it, greasily evilling his oily way across the small screen and almost audibly squelching as he goes. Mira loses herself in her tormented heroine guise and makes me believe it, but she’s so moody – riding the rollercoaster from the subzero lows of frigid bitch to the shrieking highs of full blown unreasonable batshit harpy – that’s it’s difficult to like her. Yes, I understand that she’s emotionally damaged and psychologically scarred and can’t really help any of it, but most of us who know someone like that in real life usually give up on them pretty quickly, when we finally realize that none of our advice is going to be heeded, none of our attempts to listen with a sympathetic ear will prove fruitful or be appreciated, and the constant drain of being around someone so fucked up leaves us feeling physically sick. I only wish I could say that I hadn’t been much like her character little less than a decade ago. Familiarity breeds contempt, you know.
There’s a lot of fighting, a lot of making up again, a lot of back and forth between our two living characters, huge heaping shovelfuls of Should I Stay Or Should I Go? It gets tiring after a while. By the time the ghost stuff really starts to ramp up, the movie is almost over. By the time it does end, you’re still wondering where the answers to those questions you had at films start might be. Who is the ghost? Who is the Woodsman? Who was that weird guy in the hoodie on the boat? Along with how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. I mean, I’m actually fine with films that ask you to make your own decisions about what happened, but a little information would be nice. This was more like trying to find your way through the pitch black woods without a map… or a flashlight… or a trail… or a compass… or a legitimate reason to strike out in the first fucking place.
Long story short: it’s okay. It’s pretty to look at and reasonably well acted. But ultimately, there’s too many loose ends, too much ambiguity and too lofty an aim for a story that’s basically The Shining meets Last House on the Left meets Dolores Claiborne.
