Presence
Writer: David Koepp
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, Chris Sullivan
It seems inevitable that Steven Soderbergh would make a film like Presence, and yet watching his latest feature, filmed entirely from the point-of-view of a ghost, there's also the sense that we're seeing something entirely unexpected.
Soderbergh — a prolific and obsessive filmmaker who's won legions of devotees as much for his willingness to try just about anything once as for the quality of his films — loves playing with form. He loves thinking about the language of film as much as, if not more than, the content. That's led him to do everything from long-form television to early digital video experiments to, in the case of Bubble, shooting a whodunit without trained actors and without a traditional script. Presence is yet another conceptual leap for the filmmaker, all built on what the camera really is in a cinematic story and who gets to be behind it. That alone is enough to turn out for this film. Throw in an emotionally satisfying, truly haunting ghost story, and you've got the first great horror film of 2025.
As we've already established, the film is shot entirely from the perspective of a ghost. The ghost is the camera, which means we never leave the charming old house where a new family has just moved in. Darting from room to room, the ghost meets career-driven mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), wholesome Dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), athlete son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and loner teenager Chloe (Callina Liang).
It's through Chloe that we really begin to get a sense of what this ghost is capable of. Chloe is not only the family outsider, but a girl grieving the loss of her best friend, searching for some kind of meaning beyond the sheer force of despair. When she starts to suspect something supernatural might be in the house, she thinks she's found that meaning, but her family, wrapped up in the tangled web of their own lives, is slow to agree.
The script, by David Koepp, follows Chloe's journey and that of her family as they all eventually come to the realization that Something Is Up. It's all a very solid piece of ghost story-telling, complete with a visit from a psychic and spooky bumps in the night. The entire cast, particularly Liang and a rock-solid Liu, is game for this, and they dig into the emotional realities of their characters quickly and gracefully, embracing the lean 85-minute runtime.
What takes Presence into the realm of something really special, though, is Soderbergh, and the choices he makes with his camera — and by extension the ghost — at the center of the story. Cameras, Soderbergh understands because he understands cinema, are ghosts already, other presences in the room during scenes in a film that has been (we hope) carefully constructed to help us understand a point-of-view. The camera shows you, through the magic of cinematography and editing, what the filmmaker wants you to see. You know that when a camera focuses on a subject, you're supposed to notice it, remember it, maybe even form a bond with it. The ghostly presence of the camera is the filmmaker telling you to pay attention.
But what if your camera is actually a ghost, a physical manifestation of a supernatural phenomenon? What would it look at? What would it search for in exploring the limitations of its physical space? How would it choose who to see in any given moment and who to ignore. More importantly, how would it choose when to be part of the story and not merely an observer?
These are the questions that preoccupy Presence, but because Soderbergh has such a gift for pacing and drama, and Koepp's script is so tight, you often don't notice them. You get happily wrapped up in its narrative of a family trying to hold itself together, but the more you notice what the camera is doing, the more clues you get as to what's really going on and where all of this is going. By the end, Presence is a film that, like Soderbergh's decision to make it, feels both inevitable and surprising at the same time.Â
But even beyond that, in a world in which we're always observing others, and others are always observing us, Presence is a profound, gripping study in perspective and agency, and when it really dials into its ghost story substance, it becomes truly terrifying — even harrowing. Soderbergh has, once again, achieved a perfect marriage of form and narrative and delivered an essential modern horror film.
