At The Movies: Steven Soderbergh horror Presence captivates; The Electric State sputters

Presence (M18)

85 minutes, opens on March 20 ★★★★☆

The story: An American family moves into a two-storey suburban residence occupied by a supernatural entity. Sounds like any haunted house horror, except the director here is Steven Soderbergh.

Soderbergh has never made an uninteresting movie over a 36-year career stretching from the trailblazing indie Sex, Lies, And Videotape (1989) to the Ocean’s heist trilogy (2001 to 2007) to the Magic Mike (2012 to 2023) multiplex franchise.

Every genre is a formal experiment for his craftsmanship and creative curiosity, and Presence is a ghost story told from the ghostly being’s point of view, which would be Soderbergh’s camera. Hollywood’s nimblest auteur is often his own cinematographer and editor.

The spectre is a captivating presence. It is, from the start, in the house – the single locale in the screenplay by David Koepp, who also conceived Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller Kimi (2022). It free-floats along the empty hallways, and up and down the stairs.

Then arrives the family.

Lucy Liu plays a cold corporate shark, mother of two teens. The son (Eddy Maday), a noxious high school jock, is her golden child. The younger daughter (Callina Liang) is grieving the death of her best friend, and she is not the only one in pain. The gentle patriarch (Chris Sullivan), too, weeps inconsolably when alone.

The poltergeist does not fully understand why. But this silent voyeur of their private moments can see a family coming apart – and the mortal danger in the daughter’s clandestine romance with her brother’s new buddy (West Mulholland).

Increasingly, it asserts itself to try warning her by levitating her books and violently overturning furniture.

The performances are top-notch, and more unsettling than the paranormal disturbances is the sense of impending tragedy in a very sad domestic drama.

Hot take: This is a spook show with personality.

The Electric State (NC16)

128 minutes, available on Netflix ★★☆☆☆

The story: Orphaned teen Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) makes her way across the American West with a robot to search for her long-lost brother.

Netflix spent US$320 million (S$425 million) on this?

A fair amount would have gone into visualising the 1990s retro-futuristic society. The alternate United States here is a dystopia in the aftermath of a failed revolt by the robot underclass, which is analogous to today’s migrant labourers.

Nostalgic designs aside, The Electric State is the streaming company’s most exorbitant production, with nothing to show for the money.

At the helm are the Hollywood duo Anthony and Joe Russo of the superhero blockbusters Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

They are ostensibly killing time before Avengers: Doomsday in 2026 – and, while at it, smothering to death the themes of war and technocracy in Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel. Their adaptation leaves only an insipid family-friendly road trip adventure.

A benign ball-headed bot visits Michelle one night in her foster home to alert her that her genius brother (Woody Norman) is alive and held captive somewhere. Why did his doctor (Ke Huy Quan) say he died in a car accident four years earlier?

To understand the sinister forces at work, she travels to an exclusionary zone in the desert with a low-rent smuggler, played by Chris Pratt, as her ally.

Pratt’s tough talk is as annoying as the sentient androids’ wisecracking. Everyone eventually unites in an unexciting battle against a tech oligarch (Stanley Tucci), whose villainy is to dress like Steve Jobs and get humanity hooked on virtual reality headsets. This is surely ironic social commentary from a movie that has launched a role-playing game of the same title.

Hot take: A pointless science-fiction spectacle at its most mechanical.