In the Dark Reviews

'Presence,' 'Wolf Man' succeed at delivering horror

Kirk Boxleitner | Jan 30, 20250

Courtesy photo count

Lucy Liu senses the "Presence" in Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp's haunted house film.

Courtesy photo count

Christopher Abbott fights against his newly acquired nature in Leigh Whannell's "Wolf Man."

It perhaps says something about what kind of year we're in for when the first month of 2025's movie releases have skipped straight to the sort of horror movie premises typically reserved for October.

In some ways, the two films are a study in contrasts. Steven Soderbergh has never directed a haunted house film, not even an inverted haunting such as screenwriter David Koepp helps him deliver with "Presence," while Leigh Whannell has become experienced at both writing and directing supernatural suspense thrillers for Blumhouse Productions, as he does again with "Wolf Man."

"Presence" twists the stripped-down voyeuristic aspect of the "Paranormal Activity" films inside out by assigning the movie's point of view not to "found footage" from video cameras within its haunted house, but to the unseen spirit who's doing the haunting, for reasons that are only gradually revealed.

As for "Wolf Man," it rigorously contextualizes its werewolves within a contemporary American setting, intentionally shedding the Eastern European-flavored folklore of 1941's original film version of "The Wolf Man," but it nonetheless cleaves close to the tragic heart of Lon Chaney Jr. as a sensitive, soft-spoken man who's afflicted with the curse of becoming a beast.

And yet, both films offer taut, briskly paced, sustained tension by using their respective horror movie subjects to focus on damaged modern family units, whose underlying affection is shown as struggling to overcome the ways in which they've wounded one another.

Unsurprisingly, Soderbergh's approach feels far more disciplined, with "Presence" clocking in at an hour and 25 minutes, slightly leaner than Whannell's "Wolf Man" at an hour and 43 minutes.

Soderbergh employs his relatively compact runtime more effectively than Whannell. "Presence" includes the deliberate red herring of a barely onscreen subplot involving its parents' problems, all while subtly establishing a nonlinear narrative that's key to sussing out its central mystery.

But in Whannell's defense, while "Wolf Man" telegraphs most of its major reveals much more transparently, their eventual execution remains compelling, as its male characters' infection by the werewolf curse serves as a sledgehammer-subtle metaphor for how adult sons of overly stern fathers fight against passing on the toxic masculinity they've inherited to their children.

Although "Presence" boasts the star power of Lucy Liu, flawlessly playing a professional career mom whose deeply internalized achievement allows her to choose favorites among her children, its secret weapon is Callina Liang as Liu's troubled teenage daughter, traumatized by the fresh loss of her friends.

Remove the paranormal elements of "Presence" and the emotionally stranded inability of Liang's character to adequately articulate her grief and disconnection remind me of nothing so much as reading Mary Pipher's psychological study of adolescent girls in "Reviving Ophelia."

Bonus points to Soderbergh for stepping outside of his filmmaking comfort zone by adopting a premise that relies on extended tracking shots, rather than his preferred shorter cuts, to make the audience feel the spiritual presence's intangible frustration at being constrained in affecting the events unfolding before them.

Whannell shows an ambitious streak of his own by treating us to glimpses of the werewolf's perspective in "Wolf Man," complete with enhanced senses bordering on the hallucinatory, but his strongest work involves his authentic portrayal of the abiding bond between Christopher Abbott as the protective father and Matilda Firth as his faithful grade school-age daughter.

In spite of her proven ability to deliver effective acting performances in psychological dramas, including 2023's "The Royal Hotel," Julia Garner left me strangely cold as the mom in "Wolf Man," likely because her role mostly consisted of fleeing from physical danger.

Still, Whannell sneaks in a nicely gratuitous knife twist by establishing both Garner and Abbott's characters as writers by trade, which makes it especially poignant when Abbott's lupine de-evolution renders them incapable of understanding each other's attempts at verbal communication.

If you're in the mood to be scared, both films are worth watching.