It's a shitty, low budget German Paranormal Activity. A couple and a friend head to an "abandoned" castle for an extended getaway. Obviously, things get paranormal and the vacation becomes a nightmare. It's another bad found footage Paranormal Activity knock off and considering that Paranormal activity was pretty bad, that's bad news already for The Presence. The one thing The Presence does right is to give the movie a creepy setting, well they kind of do it right. They set the film in a castle, which has potential, but the castle is supposed to be abandoned and has allegedly been so for a while. Okay, but the characters get in because one of them knows the groundskeeper. It seems weird that an abandoned building has a paid groundskeeper, but whatever, the bigger issue is the inconsistent level of abandonment. The castle has electricity and running water. They have a pretty nice kitchen with a working refrigerator. Most of the house looks way too nice and well kept to be abandoned. Sure, there is a bunch of furniture with sheets over it gathered together in an alcove, but 85% of the house looks immaculate. Everything works and nothing seems to have a speck of dust upon it, except for one tower spire, which looks like the owlery at Hogwarts. It's basically just bare wooden beams and old crap covered in dust and dirt. Why would everything in the whole castle looks flawless, except one spire? The logic of the story is equally inconsistent. All three characters sleep in sleeping bags in the same room, about three or four feet from the bedroom door. While the are asleep, there are multiple times where that door slams shut and it's an old, heavy door so it makes a lot of noise. This awakens no one. Chairs screech across the floor two feet from their heads. Nothing. Heavy, heavy pounding from the floor above, right above their room. No one even stirs. A footstep so light that I wouldn't have even known it occurred if I didn't watch every movie with subtitles. Everyone instantly snaps up and rushes to the attic. Everyone's mood wildly fluctuate from scene to scene. Also, what the Hell are they doing during the day? They are planning on spending like ten days there, but they quickly run out of food and seem to have only brought a soccer ball for entertainment. What are they doing when they aren't sleeping and looking for ghosts? One guy is typing up his "research", but what does the friend do? The girlfriend hate everything about being there, so how is she occupying all of her time? They didn't even bother to characterize the characters. We have the friend who is there because he's the hook-up for the spooky castle, but that's all we know. The Boyfriend is writing a paper on ghosts, but that's all we get. I can't even tell which character is which until they say something about the female character and I can figure out what their relationship is. Skinnier Sara Burgess is afraid of everything and hates everyone; that's her character. The paranormal events are even worse than Paranormal Activity. Doors move, we hear sounds, and somehow a digital camera is corrupted by the ghost, which shows via bad tracking and random blips of future events or random screaming faces. Digital files don't react like this and what purpose would a ghost have to take a three frames from the last fifteen minutes and flash them at us in after the first thirty? It's awful. It's all awful. Sometimes the acting isn't awful, but it's never good. Paranormal Activity was made for $15 million in 2007. The Presence was made seven years later for over twice the money ($40 million), so why does it look so much worse. The acting is probably equally bad and I doubt any of the actors had name value to validate the cost. Was it just to use the castle? If so, it wasn't worth it and The Presence isn't worth 83 minutes of your life.
It's a shitty, low budget German Paranormal Activity. A couple and a friend head to an "abandoned" castle for an extended getaway. Obviously, things get paranormal and the vacation becomes a nightmare. It's another bad found footage Paranormal Activity knock off and considering that Paranormal activity was pretty bad, that's bad news already for The Presence. The one thing The Presence does right is to give the movie a creepy setting, well they kind of do it right. They set the film in a castle, which has potential, but the castle is supposed to be abandoned and has allegedly been so for a while. Okay, but the characters get in because one of them knows the groundskeeper. It seems weird that an abandoned building has a paid groundskeeper, but whatever, the bigger issue is the inconsistent level of abandonment. The castle has electricity and running water. They have a pretty nice kitchen with a working refrigerator. Most of the house looks way too nice and well kept to be abandoned. Sure, there is a bunch of furniture with sheets over it gathered together in an alcove, but 85% of the house looks immaculate. Everything works and nothing seems to have a speck of dust upon it, except for one tower spire, which looks like the owlery at Hogwarts. It's basically just bare wooden beams and old crap covered in dust and dirt. Why would everything in the whole castle looks flawless, except one spire? The logic of the story is equally inconsistent. All three characters sleep in sleeping bags in the same room, about three or four feet from the bedroom door. While the are asleep, there are multiple times where that door slams shut and it's an old, heavy door so it makes a lot of noise. This awakens no one. Chairs screech across the floor two feet from their heads. Nothing. Heavy, heavy pounding from the floor above, right above their room. No one even stirs. A footstep so light that I wouldn't have even known it occurred if I didn't watch every movie with subtitles. Everyone instantly snaps up and rushes to the attic. Everyone's mood wildly fluctuate from scene to scene. Also, what the Hell are they doing during the day? They are planning on spending like ten days there, but they quickly run out of food and seem to have only brought a soccer ball for entertainment. What are they doing when they aren't sleeping and looking for ghosts? One guy is typing up his "research", but what does the friend do? The girlfriend hate everything about being there, so how is she occupying all of her time? They didn't even bother to characterize the characters. We have the friend who is there because he's the hook-up for the spooky castle, but that's all we know. The Boyfriend is writing a paper on ghosts, but that's all we get. I can't even tell which character is which until they say something about the female character and I can figure out what their relationship is. Skinnier Sara Burgess is afraid of everything and hates everyone; that's her character. The paranormal events are even worse than Paranormal Activity. Doors move, we hear sounds, and somehow a digital camera is corrupted by the ghost, which shows via bad tracking and random blips of future events or random screaming faces. Digital files don't react like this and what purpose would a ghost have to take a three frames from the last fifteen minutes and flash them at us in after the first thirty? It's awful. It's all awful. Sometimes the acting isn't awful, but it's never good. Paranormal Activity was made for $15 million in 2007. The Presence was made seven years later for over twice the money ($40 million), so why does it look so much worse. The acting is probably equally bad and I doubt any of the actors had name value to validate the cost. Was it just to use the castle? If so, it wasn't worth it and The Presence isn't worth 83 minutes of your life.
