Presence | 2025
Lucy Liu in PRESENCE. Courtesy of NEON.
A ghostly presence haunts a family's new home in Steven Soderbergh's Presence - but this is in no way a typical haunted house movie. Soderbergh puts the audience directly in the spirit's point of view, drifting in and out of rooms and observing the new family's unfolding conflicts.
It's a relatively daring formal experiment, although we've seen a few films pop up like this over the last year or so. In a Violent Nature - which was shot from the point of view of a slasher movie villain, and RaMell Ross' Academy Award-nominated Nickel Boys, which shows us its protagonist's journeys from shifting first-person perspectives. While Presence adheres to its stylistic conceit better than In a Violent Nature, its DNA is actually closer to Nickel Boys. While it may seem like a bit of a stretch to compare Soderbergh's haunted house movie to Ross' ravishing work in Nickel Boys - their uses of form to engender a sense of empathy aren't entirely dissimilar.
In Presence, the ghost whose point of view we share remains mysterious. At first a passive figure in the house, the spirit soon begins to take an active interest in the family's lives, especially that of their teen daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), in whose closet it resides. The presence becomes protective of her, watching over her and the rest of the family as they navigate both the travails of adulthood and the trials of high school and budding young love. As the family becomes aware of the presence, they grow increasingly nervous, unsure of its origin or intentions. When brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) plays a cruel prank on a classmate, the spirit flies into a rage and trashes his room. When a potential new boyfriend tries to drug Chloe, the spirit knocks her drink off the table. It isn't until the final moments that the spirit's true intentions are revealed. Still, through its eyes, we become invested in the struggles of this family, each of us passive outsiders wishing we could intervene and become active participants.
Billed as a horror film, Presence is more sad than scary, filled with a languid sense of melancholy as the lonely spirit wanders from room to room, lost in its own suspended spiritual state, floating to the mournful strains of Zack Ryan's wistful score. There's something almost intangible about the way the film conveys its deep sense of loneliness and alienation - by putting the audience in the ghost's shoes, we can feel its frustrations, its confusion, and its sadness. While its fractured nature doesn't always work, Soderbergh nevertheless creates an aching family portrait filled with longing and regret, whose tragic, unseen protagonist seeks to right past wrongs and point the family to a better future.
That sense of leaving unfinished business behind is what makes Presence so spooky - the everyday dangers of life become the real threats: close calls, unscrupulous lovers, cruel pranks - the tragedy of finally seeing them for what they are in hindsight. The final reveal is a bit of a wallop, but it really seals the film's haunting sense of melancholia. It's a bracing formal experiment whose conceit enhances rather than impedes its emotional core, reimagining the classic haunted house story into something that, like its ghostly protagonist, feels timeless yet thrillingly modern.
