438 - Presence

"Steven Soderbergh's making a horror film from the perspective of the ghost" turns out to be a sentence specifically designed to appeal to Mike, who has been looking forward to Presence for ages. (José struggles to remember the film's title, even moments after having seen it.) But part of that pitch is deeply misleading. Presence's trailers were loaded with quotes from overeager horror publications that praised the film's fear factor, which leads to a little confusion when the final product is revealed to be a family drama that, despite the ghost whose eyes we see everything through, isn't even trying to scare us. And that's great! We just didn't realise that's what we were in for. What Presence gives us is a compelling exercise in film form and storytelling that constantly maintains our interest and which we thoroughly enjoy, but which sadly disappoints us in a variety of ways - though only a few of which we agree on. What interests Mike about the film's camerawork and handling of its invisible, point-of-view character leaves José unimpressed; Mike doesn't get what José does out of the critique of modern masculinity. But despite our disagreements and disappointments, we enthusiastically recommend Presence as an experiment worth experiencing. It's intriguing, efficient, and original - and there's very little like it. Recorded on 24th January 2025.

Om Podcasten

"I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what I hope to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation." - José Arroyo. "I just like the sound of my own voice." - Michael Glass.