Some may lose patience with it, however, and I couldn’t exactly argue with them.
Maybe not a jump out of your chair moment or even a scream, but just a general feeling of uneasiness that persists, which to me is better anyway. West never speaks or moves until the 3rd act, so when someone sweeps a light across a room and we see him just standing there watching them (and of course, they don’t see him), it almost always produces results. Yet the addition of another main character (Sorvino’s boyfriend) and more dialogue does not diminish the impact of the scare scenes it’s quite a while before we know for sure if West is a good or bad ghost, making his appearances quite unnerving. Once we get a bit of a handle on things, other characters are introduced, though the film still goes on long stretches with minimal or no dialogue, and the cast only totals six (three living, three not).
The first 15 minutes of the movie are entirely without dialogue as we gradually figure out the situation – he’s stuck in the house, he’s fixated on her, and she’s blissfully unaware of his (sigh) presence. For starters it was much creepier than I expected I was thinking it would be like Ghost or something, with a ghostly guy just sort of hanging around near the woman he loves and maybe protecting her from a bad guy at the end to give it some action, but no – for a good chunk of the movie, our hero ghost (Shane West) is flat out scary, wordlessly watching our heroine (Mira Sorvino) as she goes about her day without noticing him. Well not only was it an acceptable choice for her, but it was a pretty good movie, period.
Just because it’s Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean I get the night off from HMADing, so I figured it was a good “compromise” for Mrs. As I am once again down to maybe 2-3 horror movies in the entire store that I haven’t seen, I opted for The Presence over the others, due to the fact that it sounded a bit more romantic than La Santeria or Zombie Nation.