Rating: 7.5/10

Spoilers ahead for “Presence”.

The ghost haunting trope: one of the most — if not the most — stereotypical horror tropes to have ever become popularized.

Given how stereotypical it is, it might even be tempting to argue such a trope is irrelevant in our modern age of convoluted psychological thrillers, weird vampire sex movies and disturbing body horror.

On one hand, you’d be right to have that argument; ghost hauntings are just not good material for films that are meant to be scary.

On the other hand, there’s always a lot of artistic value that can be gained from subverting a traditional trope for an ulterior purpose, and that’s exactly what “Presence” does best. Although it doesn’t exactly deliver on the traditional horror or thriller that you’d expect, the perspective “Presence” takes on this traditional trope is intriguing and — for all its faults — uniquely innovative.

The main feature — or gimmick, depending on how you look at it — of “Presence” is its unique cinematography. The film is shot from the first-person perspective of the ghost, spirit, presence or whatever the hell it is that’s haunting the house in the movie. Although it does run the risk of becoming gimmicky at times, the shot does much more to help the film than it does to hurt it.

There are times when the special shot is touching, giving us insight into a unique character arc that involves a sort of posthumous redemption for one of the main characters. Then there are also times when you just have to laugh because it’s so obvious that the creators of the film are self-aware of how weird it is to film from the first-person perspective of a ghost. 

For example, there’s one scene where the main character and her boyfriend are undressing together, so the ghost starts destroying her closet to stop them from having sex. It’s things like this that make the new shot perspective unique and funny without being obtrusive or ruining your enjoyment of the movie.

However, the new shot does come with one absolutely huge issue: It is tasked with carrying the entire movie.

There are a lot of problems with this film. The dialogue is some of the worst I’ve ever witnessed, almost all the characters are completely insufferable, and — although the plot has some interesting existential themes — it is fairly stereotypical and forgettable.

Even so, there are times when “Presence” comes remarkably close to finding solid footing in its own right. The relationship between the father and daughter in the film is touching, and there are a few scenes that seem relatively realistic, dialogue-wise. But then you’ll just have a random subplot opened up about tax fraud that’s never followed up on. Also, why the hell do you need to have a subplot about tax fraud in a thriller movie in the first place?

It’s difficult to fault anyone in particular for some of these issues; it is a ghost haunting movie after all. Still, the burden is on studios to produce good films, and they just aren’t nailing a lot of the fundamentals here.

This is why it’s so difficult to accurately judge “Presence”. Although it does have a lot of issues that would have me throw out almost any other film, the unique style taken by the movie almost demands a watch. It’s at least nice to see something innovative in the industry from time to time, and this movie is certainly a leader in that department.

So, I think as my final verdict, I’ll have to say this: Go watch it, but don’t expect greatness; instead, expect a unique and innovative film with plenty of its own faults. It’s not perfect, but it’s different. And sometimes, that’s enough.

Kaleb Blizzard is a philosophy sophomore and opinion writer for The Battalion.

A still from ‘Dìdi’
| Photo Credit: Focus Features/YouTube

It is the stuff of horrors, mostly, to look back at your teenage years. Not just reminisce over the carefree days but really look at the awkward growing pains. Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical film Dìdi is a similarly unflinching and jarringly specific teenage snapshot capturing the final years of the aughts.

Set in 2008 Fremont, California — a city defined by its proximity to Silicon Valley — Dìdi is quick and eager to throw us into the deep end of early social media. 14-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) rapidly switches from one tab to the next on his computer as he pores through YouTube videos and replies to messages on AOL. Later, we see him in his basement, through the hazy lens of a camcorder, recording amateur skateboarding tricks. Sean Wang directs his film within the vast confines of the burgeoning internet age, as Chris and his friends “poke” each other on Facebook and learn about their crushes’ interests through Myspace pages.

In his script Sean Wang, whose documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó was nominated at the 96^th Academy Awards, balances the universality of a life marked by social media with the unique circumstances faced by a Taiwanese-American teenager. Chris steals his sister’s band T-shirts to impress his crush, sneaks out to a party and then samples a cigarette to fit in with his older friends. When around his friends, he is boisterous, careless, and a menace. At home, Chris is weighed down by the absence of his father, while he deals with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua), and a quiet but concerned mother (Joan Chen). At home, he is not the Wang-Wang who carries a dead squirrel in the backpack to show his friends, but instead “dìdi” as his mother and grandmother call him, which translates to “little brother” in Mandarin.

Wang punctuates the eruptions in teenage boys with quiet inward contemplations. When Chris sees his mother using a knife and fork at McDonald’s, he chides her by saying, “You’re so Asian”. Later in the film, we see him leave behind his school friends to go film skateboarding tricks with some older kids, to whom he lies and claims that he is only “half-Asian”. The script, which at times may feel like Sean Wang has filled in with his own personal diary entries, doesn’t concern itself with picking through Chris’ individual problems. To him, all this seems like a jumbled mess that he can’t make sense of. So, when the script in a similar fashion is seamless in its chaos, Dìdi emerges to be a standout coming-of-age film.

The film is underscored by Izaac Wang and Joan Chen’s performance who take turns to individually anchor the script’s pathos. Joan Chen plays Chungsing Wang, a reserved painter, as a caring but cheeky mom, whose scenes with Chris embody a range of emotions.

In Dìdi, Sean Wang pulls from his memory, and from the public memory, the experience of being a teenager in 2008. It is a tightly shot, intimate, yet sweeping affair that conjures personal memories.

Dìdi is available for streaming on JioCinema

Working in his native Colorado, as he did in his memorable debut feature, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman again conjures a potent visual language from the landscape in Rebuilding. And, again, the writer-director places a halting love story at the center of his film. This time, though, the rural vista is scarred by a devastating wildfire, and it isn’t sweethearts separated by time who become reacquainted but a father and his young daughter, separated by divorce.

That father is an unmoored cowboy named Dusty, trying to figure out what comes next after the flames have destroyed his ranch, the place that defines him. The wrenching heart of this quiet drama, he’s played with eloquent understatement by Josh O’Connor, delivering the latest in a remarkable string of performances, and one that’s matched beat for poignant beat by the other members of the central cast.

Notwithstanding the eerie timeliness of the movie, arriving as Los Angeles is reeling from disastrous conflagrations, this is a work whose riches transcend topicality. With his understanding of and affection for the hardy inhabitants of the mountainous American West, Walker-Silverman brings a new and tender radiance to the idea of regional filmmaking, along with an awareness of outworn stereotypes. Upending clichés about rugged individualism, Rebuilding looks toward a communal vision of courageousness and reinvention, a way to move forward without negating the past — especially when the remnants of that past have been reduced to ash.

Reteaming with cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, Walker-Silverman wields an elegant shorthand, beginning with the ominous beauty of embers against a night sky. Cutting from that opening image to a ghostly scorched forest of leafless trees, Rebuilding delves straight into Dusty’s limbo, beginning with the auction of the cattle his charred land can no longer sustain. The editing, by Jane Rizzo and Ramzi Bashour, is finely attuned to the straightforward, crystalline lensing and the story’s often wordless poignancy. And the acoustic score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington is in sync with the interplay of dialogue and loaded silences, and well abetted by the occasional strains of country on the radio of Dusty’s truck. (A John Prine tune caps things off in the perfect key.)

Having kicked around here and there for a couple of months after the fire, Dusty is the last arrival at a mini-village of FEMA trailers arranged on a remote scrap of land. Alone in the narrow interior of his new home with the few boxes that hold his remaining earthly possessions, he jumps in his truck to escape the aching silence, arriving at a cheery clapboard house in town. Its kid-friendly yard clutter and warm interior (outstanding work by production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto) are an antidote to the sudden, awful emptiness of Dusty’s days. This is the home of his former mother-in-law, Bess (Any Madigan), and it’s where his ex, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), is raising their 9-year-old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre).

Ruby is surprised to see him, but doesn’t waste the opportunity to enlist him in some parenting. Without spelling it out in conversation, this narrative sequence makes clear, in Ruby’s almost angry decisiveness, Callie-Rose’s shyness bordering on detachment, and Dusty’s awkward hesitation, that he hasn’t been a steady part of his little girl’s life for a while. LaTorre, who starred opposite Sarah Snook in Run Rabbit Run, is captivating, conveying her character’s perceptiveness as well as the observational knack she’s inherited from her mother. “Mom says you didn’t apply yourself,” she informs her dad, who takes the judgment good-naturedly even as he feels the sting. Sometimes, clearly, his daughter’s intelligence intimidates him.

For Callie-Rose, whose guardedness soon gives way to infatuation, there’s an unmistakable gift in her father’s calamity: He’s released from the chores that claimed all his waking hours. The cowboy stuff that once put him at a distance is now a source of fascination and a way of connecting. In an especially lovely scene, he teaches her to saddle his horse, being housed for now by a fellow rancher (Dwight Mondragon). Dusty’s trailer-park life is no less an adventure for his daughter. She makes a new friend (Zeilyanna Martinez), a tween girl whose father died in the wildfire, and together they plant a firmament of glow-in-the-dark stars on the drab walls of Dusty’s trailer, interrupting his despair with magic.

Callie-Rose helps to draw her father into this new community, a place he initially regards as a mere way station, a blip on the road back to the life he’s always known. But that road is not as direct as he envisions it. A man of few words, Dusty is most animated when talking about rebuilding the ranch that has been in his family for four generations. You can see his dream of that yearned-for return shatter, and his soul sink, as he takes in the crushing advice of a loan officer (Jefferson Mays) at the local bank.

The people Dusty at first views as “not real neighbors anyway” quickly become a family of sorts, sharing meals and memories of the things they lost in the fire. With the exception of Mali, a heroically even-keeled widow played by Kali Reis, of True Detective, the roles of Dusty’s fellow survivors are handled by first-time screen actors, including the accomplished musician Binky Griptite. Most of them have a few moments of character-sketch screen time, but, more to Walker-Silverman’s point, they stand collectively in calm, sturdy rebuke to the notion, long endorsed by Hollywood, of a homogenous rural America. (Another Sundance selection this year, the South Dakota-set East of Wall, offers its own cliché-busting picture of the West.)

Dusty’s new neighbors include a lesbian couple (Nancy Morlan and Kathy Rose), a biracial couple (Biptite and Jeanine London), an affable plumber (David Bright) and a man of the woods (Christopher Young) who maintains a friendly distance. Mainly they’re emblems, here not to complicate the story but to provide a composite portrait of kindness and resilience. (The most glaringly underdeveloped role in the drama belongs to Ruby’s partner, Robbie, an amenable guitar-strumming fellow played by Sam Engbring.)

In the presence of his fellow FEMA tenants, Dusty is at first like a forlorn big kid, slouching slightly as if to minimize his towering frame, thrusting his normally hardworking, newly idle hands into his jeans pockets, and, yes, occasionally helping himself to one of his daughter’s juice boxes. But beneath the lost, juvenile aura are questions of legacy and a keen awareness of the life he’s inherited — not an easy one, as the dates on his parents’ headstones in the family plot attest.

The matter of rootedness is addressed head-on when Callie-Rose goes to work on a family tree, presumably for school. As the girl, her parents and grandmother sit around a table filled with names and photographs, what might have been merely literal in lesser hands unfurls with a powerful current of love beneath its minimal dialogue.

Fahy, infusing her atypical role with an earthy grace, delivers a couple of the movie’s most affecting passages, the language’s simplicity matched by the emotions’ enormity. And Madigan’s modest directness lays a foundation for the drama in a way that’s so masterful in its subtlety, you’d be tempted to call it sleight of hand.

On the face of it, Dusty is a role that might seem a stretch even for shapeshifter O’Connor, who in a few short years has traveled a path of electrifying versatility, beginning with God’s Own Country and his star-making turn on The Crown, and on through such diverse terrain as Mothering Sunday, La Chimera and Challengers. But the British actor is compelling from first moment to last, fully inhabiting the character’s pain and confusion as well as his essential optimism.

Everyone in Rebuilding is sincere, honest and caring, and nothing is overplayed — including the bashful love that blossoms between Dusty and Callie-Rose and is the engine of the story. As this exceptionally quiet movie unfolds, there are moments when you might wish for more friction, more heat, like the healthy dashes of hot sauce with which Madigan’s character doses the scrambled eggs she serves her granddaughter. But Walker-Silverman is a filmmaker who doesn’t hew to formulaic arcs, and it would be a mistake to interpret quietness as tranquility or ease. Something more complex and rewarding than surface tension is at play here, and it builds to a conclusion of breathtaking openheartedness. Sometimes a blip on the road is magic in disguise, the root of a dazzling new constellation.