Review of Presence (d. Steven Soderbergh, 2025)
It’s now been thirteen years since Steven Soderbergh, preceding the release of his 2013 drug addiction-themed thriller Side Effects, said he would retire from filmmaking. Lest you think the man was enervated, it now scans as another sign of his signature restlessness: walking the statement back just weeks later, he’s since made ten films in the last eight years. This fertile stretch has brought Soderbergh’s longstanding flair for savvy genre work—which arguably peaked with his first such excursion, 1998’s exemplary Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight—into the twenty-first century, combining classical thrills with contemporary anxieties. While few, if any, are as acclaimed as his early-career masterpieces—my favorite is probably 2019’s High Flying Bird, which depicted the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing required to end a fictionalized NBA lockout, and with it, get the players fairly compensated, a not-too-subtle allegory for the filmmaker’s own struggle against the studio system—they’re all animated by Soderbergh’s singular sense as a formalist and willingness to embrace new methods. High Flying Bird was shot on an iPhone, as was 2018’s nervy Unsane, and even when their narratives falter, intrigue never dissipates due to an almost giddy sense of experimentation and play emanating from its maker. His canny collisions of the old and new convey a faith in the medium’s continued possibilities, a refreshing conviction that, frankly, doesn’t seem to be held by all that many these days.
Faith looms large in his latest film, Presence, his second collaboration with another longtime genre stalwart, writer David Koepp (the first was 2022’s underrated Kimi). Marketed as a thriller, Soderbergh has preferred another designation: a ghost story. This feels right: the film, centering on a family of four moving into a creaky house in an affluent suburb that is then bedeviled by both a poltergeist and their own worsening relations, is short on jolts and more creepy than scary. Throughout the film, various forms of faith are tested: teenage daughter Chloe (a revelatory Callina Liang) first believes that something unseen stalks the house’s winding staircases and hallways, very much to the chagrin of her careerist mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu, in hilariously nasty form) and bully of an older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday), and has an even stronger sense that it calls out to her specifically. Patriarch Chris (Chris Sullivan) is more empathetic, first due to his concern over his daughter’s prolonged bout of despair over the sudden death of a friend, later as a purported result of his own evolving relationship with Catholicism (he left the Church in his youth for its dogmatic stridency but has since returned to it on his own terms). Once the presence (that’s what Chloe calls it) makes itself known to the entire family in ways both more overt and more aligned with audience’s own bump-in-the-night expectations, a medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres) is summoned to the house. In an indelible touch, we learn she can’t stay there long: she’s here on her lunch break from her day job. That this is a for-love-of-the-game side-hustle doesn’t prevent her from delivering an ominous prophecy that is fulfilled in the film’s frenzied twist finale.
If it seems like I’m being cagey about the plot, I’d wager that Presence—a lean, mean, genre exercise reliant on both sustained suspense and narrative machinations—is somewhat susceptible to spoilers. Yet it bears mentioning that the solutions proffered by Koepp’s script to the film’s core mysteries are perhaps its least convincing elements. The violent revelations of the final scenes feel less like the earned payoff to mounting tensions than an all-too-literal jump that stretches not just the film’s tone but the script’s logic to its breaking point. This is due, in part, to the plot’s increasing demands of the young actors, who aside from the resolute Liang are a bit of a mixed-bag. Maday captures Tyler’s barrel-chested hauteur but is a little green, while West Mulholland, playing Tyler’s swim-team friend and Chloe’s clandestine hookup Ryan, sports a raffish mop of blonde hair, a facility with prescription drugs (“I’ll be your pharmacist” is his idea of a come-on), and a severe lack of gravitas that becomes more of a problem the closer he moves to the plot’s center. Yet Koepp’s script makes up for these non-trivial shortcomings in the margins. Take note of the pervasive rot that plagues this family (named, not at all coincidentally, the Paynes), and you’ll see a collage of modern America falling apart: a failing marriage, teenage drug addiction, under-the-table financial fraud, misogynistic young men disseminating revenge porn without remorse, harried faith both devout and lapsed providing little solace either way. Sharply edited with abrupt cuts to black between scenes, it’s a jagged portrait of a family coming undone, a feel-bad movie well-suited for our feel-awful times.
Yet the film thrills nonetheless, in no small part due to Soderbergh’s continued experiments with digital cinematography. Working once again as his own director of photography (credited under his long-held pseudonym Peter Andrews), he’s given himself another high-concept formal limitation: the film is a ghost story shot from the perspective of the ghost, never leaving the house it haunts, all through long, handheld takes that rove to and fro. Which conversations we voyeuristically eavesdrop on and which ones we shirk away from not only convey a genuine subjectivity behind the film’s frames but also bring the typical subtext of haunted-house stories to the forefront: why, exactly, does this presence haunt the Paynes? While the film’s script provides a literal, diegetic answer to that question, one can just as easily point to Soderbergh himself as the specter haunting his own film. This heady self-reflexivity assures that Presence is always compelling, despite its by-the-numbers flaws, something that could be said of much of its maker’s recent work. Despite the film’s dourness, it restores your faith in the medium’s power to shock and haunt anew—that old forms can be enlivened by new methods, that with the right framing, something wicked this way still comes.
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Reviewed 2/01/2025