The latest collaboration from director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp is “Presence,” a haunted house movie set in the home of an average suburban family (led by Lucy Liu and Soderbergh’s “The Knick” star Chris Sullivan). What could be a typical scary movie is elevated by the aesthetic choice to tell the story from the ghost’s point-of-view, so you see it drifting around the house, listening in on conversations between members of the family and occasionally letting itself be known by shaking things or knocking down objects.
And since the movie is told from the ghost’s perspective, that leaves an inherent mystery at the center of “Presence:” who is the ghost?
Read on for more on this, but a very massive spoiler warning should be issued first. Don’t read this without seeing the movie first. Watch it and come on back. It’ll still be here (and you might have questions).
What happens at the end of “Presence?”
At the end of presence, the human side of the drama and the more supernatural side of the drama collide, violently. Throughout the film, the family’s teenage daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) has been getting closer to her brother Tyler’s (Eddy Maday) good friend Ryan (West Mulholland). But little by little we’ve seen that Ryan is a creep. At one point he tries to spike Chloe’s drink, which the spirit knocks over, saving her. It is also revealed that Ryan is responsible for the recent deaths of two different high school girls. Towards the end of the movie, Ryan is actually successful at spiking Chloe’s drink and is about to kill her when Tyler storms in, colliding with Ryan. They both fall out of Chloe’s second floor window and die.
Who is the ghost?
At the very end of the movie, Liu is looking at an old mirror, that had been a part of the house forever and which has properties that allow it to exist between worlds. (A psychic told the family this!) While Liu is staring at the mirror she sees her son Tyler in the reflection. He was the ghost this whole time, protecting his sister from Ryan and attempting to save her life.
Why is this confusing to people?
The dead girls that are frequently talked about earlier in the movie seem like the most obvious red herring. But we’ve also seen enough haunted house movies to know that most of the time the ghost died on the premises, which negates the two dead girls.
We asked writer David Koepp about it.
“It surprises me that some people don’t get that. I feel like it’s thunderingly clear. It was even a little clearer at one point. I had one more setup, and Steven cut it because it’s his. I’m not giving out leaflets in the lobby. He’s a little more comfortable with ambiguity than I am. And he said, ‘It’s not ambiguous.’ I said, Okay,’” Koepp said.
The identity of the ghost was something that Koepp always knew while writing, “which is why he doesn’t want to watch his sister having sex and when the brother talks about that horrible prank he played at school, the presence goes upstairs and trashes the brother’s room because it’s self-loathing. That all made sense to me as I was doing it,” Koepp said.
Have the concepts been introduced earlier in the movie?
Yes, the idea of time working differently for ghosts (or in this case looping back around to protect a loved one) is introduced by a psychic earlier in the movie. And while the two dead friends were definitely something that Koepp utilized to divert our attention (he said, “There’s a certain amount of, Hey, look over here, look over here, look over here. I was doing that with the with the friends”), everything is set up properly for the reveal of the brother being the ghost.
It was all right there!
Will the ghost stay in the house?
That’s a great question! It seems like he probably will be stuck there, as the family moves out following Tyler’s death. But who knows. Maybe that’s a question for “Presence 2.”
“Presence” is in theaters now.
