Steven Soderbergh figures out his ghost story

Steven Soderbergh has never made a horror movie, and certainly not of the ghostly, haunted variety. His movies tend to be exacting, precise, so even when they’re frightening, as with the stalker nightmare Unsane or the chilling disease thriller Contagion, that fear comes from witnessing a process failing with just as much efficiency as when it succeeds. Death, as depicted in his new horror thriller Presence, has no such clarity of success and failure. The sense of loss left behind feels like a kind of failure, yet it is both inevitable and unknowable. These are some of the mysteries eating away at teenage Chloe (Callina Liang), who has just lost her best friend Nadia to a drug overdose and is now moving into a new house with her semi-functional family.

Yes, it’s the old something-not-quite-right-with-this-house-that’s-supposed-to-solve-everything business: Chloe feels shivers of offness in her new home, which concerns her sweet-natured but frustrated father Chris (Chris Sullivan) and mostly annoys her jock brother Tyler (Eddy Maday)—who is the clear favorite of distracted mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), further bedeviled by some vague but obviously Soderberghian financial malfeasance at work. As far as Rebecca is concerned, that’s the issue that should require discussion in hushed tones, not the creaks and chills of otherness that Chloe feels. Is it Nadia, Chloe wonders? Or just, as her parents assume, an expression of her grief and loneliness?

The identity question may linger, but there’s no fake suspense over whether Chloe is imagining things. To depict this haunting, Soderbergh imposes a system onto a spiritual dimension where none should necessarily exist: He shoots the entire movie from the point of view of an unseen spirit that does indeed drift through the house; “presence” is also, essentially, the title character. It’s a Paranormal Activity movie turned inside-out: Rather than a largely stationary camera capturing flickers of spooky but eerily realistic movement in the frame, the camera remains mobile and hovering, its ghostliness an invisible but driving force. Like the Paranormal films, there is an element of surveillance: The camera travels through rooms unnoticed, overhearing bits of conversation and observing actions kept secret from other characters. It’s at once omniscient and deeply subjective. There’s also another technical challenge on hand for Soderbergh, who has professed far more affinity for the cut than the epically long take: to stay true to his POV gimmick, most scenes are staged in single unbroken shots. Cuts move forward in time, not within a scene.

The simultaneous braininess and gimmickry of this technique, applied to a David Koepp screenplay that unapologetically eschews A Ghost Story-style metaphysical traversing, could have stranded Presence in a liminal zone between shlock and airless experiment. What Soderbergh winds up achieving is more reminiscent of his throwback crime pictures, like the Criss Cross remake The Underneath or more recent thrillers like the period noir No Sudden Move and the intensely Early 2020s Kimi. That is to say that Presence has the story, limited scope, and 85-minute runtime of a 1940s B-picture, infused—as those pictures often were, and as his crime movies usually are—with a disciplined style and contemporary electricity. It’s budget Gothic that’s worth every penny and then some.

In that context, it’s less surprising that Soderbergh didn’t recruit anyone from his ever-growing unofficial rep company for this cast: No Matt Damon as the dad, no Catherine Zeta-Jones as the mom, no Riley Keough as a cool aunt dropping by. (Julia Fox, however, does have one scene as a real-estate agent. No word on whether she’s bumpin’ that.) The central quartet playing the family all does wonderful work, and in a movie with several talented young performers, frequent stage/TV/character actor Sullivan feels like the belated discovery as the flustered but loving father. The familial relationships that Soderbergh and Koepp set up aren’t necessarily wide-ranging or unpredictable, but as Presence ticks toward an inevitable confrontation, they’re surprisingly involving. There’s a circularity to Presence that is both entirely in keeping with a haunted-house story and, in this telling, even moving. It’s yet another genre that Soderbergh has worked like a problem, and produced an elegant solution.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: David Koepp

Starring: Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Lucy Liu, Eddy Maday, Julia Fox

Release Date: January 24, 2025