Presence (2024)

Shot entirely on a slightly distorted wide-angle, which seems to be handheld but on some janky stabilizing rig with weird movements. I don't like the camera, but I do like that it means every scene is a long, continuous shot.

Straight-forward ghost story with no real twists, and a few side threads that they don't bother to follow.

Successful business woman Lucy Liu and her husband have two teenagers. Liu loves her bully jock son, perhaps somewhat incestuously, while dad loves his psychologically traumatized daughter who recently lost her best friend to a drug overdose. Except the dead friend's spirit is actually living in her closet for some reason, perhaps.

We mostly watch a teen drama through the eyes of the silent closet ghost, as the traumatized daughter slowly falls in love with her brother's classmate, an Evan Peters wannabe. There are some family mysteries going on, though they don't really bother to wrap any of those up in the end.

It doesn't ask or answer any questions about the supernatural or afterlife or religion or the meaning of anything. There's just a ghost about. It saves the daughter from rapey high school boy, the end. Oh, but it's out of time and the ghost wasn't her dead friend at all, but her still-living-at-the-time brother. The ghost hunter that they had conveniently stumbled upon explained that ghosts aren't bound by linear time, so your ghost doesn't actually have to be dead yet. There wasn't any reason for this, really, they just needed a twisty twist.