‘Presence’ is available to stream on-demand
After director Steven Soderbergh’s planned 2013 theatrical film, “Behind the Candelabra,” ran into funding difficulties and eventually landed on HBO for a cable release, the prolific director announced his retirement. In what is, perhaps, the shortest retirement in filmmaking history, Soderbergh was back with his short-lived, though compelling, two-season HBO series, “The Knick.” In 2017, Soderbergh’s film retirement ended with “Logan Lucky.” In 2025, filmgoers have had the opportunity to see two Soderbergh films, “Black Bag,” and “Presence.” While moviegoers are still waiting for Quentin Tarantino’s reported 10th and final film, Soderbergh has hit that mark in his post-retirement phase. A film resume that includes 35 films since he burst onto the scene with 1989’s indie breakout, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Soderbergh is prolific, I’ll give him that. Substance and quality are sometimes the victims of his breakneck filming pace. Soderbergh makes films fast and relatively inexpensively. They don’t typically run long, and they can feel, at times, more experimental exercises than multiplex crowd pleasers. It’s been a while since Soderbergh gave us an “Erin Brockovich” or an “Ocean’s Eleven,” although they were studio-backed projects, they share a filmmaking quality that’s all Soderbergh. I haven’t caught up with “Black Bag,” but I did see “Presence,” and I was pleasantly surprised with the result.
“Presence” belongs to the ghost-story/haunted house genre, but the film Soderbergh gives us feels decidedly more thriller than horror film. It lacks scares, and I don’t think Soderbergh or screenwriter David Koepp were interested in making a scary movie. Instead, the goal here is more closely aligned with an experimental take on presenting a haunting. In “Presence,” we experience a first-person perspective throughout, or I guess we could say, “first-presence” experience, as the entire film is shot in single wide-angle takes from the perspective of an unseen entity.
Again, I wasn’t scared for an instant, but what the film lacks in creepiness, it makes up for in fascination. What unfolds over a tight 82 minutes is more of a detective thriller. As an audience, all of the information we get is from whatever the presence learns about the Payne family—Rebekah, Chris, and their two teenage children, Tyler and Chloe. They are a new family who have moved into an old house. We meet the house before we meet the family, as the “presence” is already there, taking us through a visual tour of the empty dwelling.
Piece-by-piece, we learn that the Payne family moved to a neighboring town after experiencing tragedy. The daughter is grieving the loss of a best friend due to an overdose. The mom, played by Lucy Liu, is an A-type personality whose obsession over her son, and possible illicit doings at work, have driven a wedge between her and her husband, played by Chris Sullivan. We never receive all the details about what is happening in this family’s life, because Koepp’s script is more intelligent than to provide an info-laden monologue dump.
Slowly but eventually, the presence makes itself known, first to Chloe and then to the rest of the family. A medium is brought in, and some clever and useful bits of script information are divulged.
Throughout the film’s plot, there is a plot that I don’t want to spoil here, and Soderbergh and Koepp provide the right amount of information to keep up with the story, but not so much that the ending of the film is given away.
And it’s the story that resolves itself and comes full circle by the film’s closing moments that makes “Presence” a fun watch. If you can work past the fact that it isn’t scary, I think you’ll find it a unique and worthy offering to the haunted house genre. It ranks up there amongst Soderbergh’s better recent efforts. And if you find even the slightest bit of tension scary, “Presence” could be one of the more frightening films you see all year.
James Kent is the arts editor at The Mountain Times.
