As much as I enjoyed our journey through the world of ghost movies, I do have to wonder if I watched one ghost movie too many. Or perhaps I just chose the wrong ghost movie to end my series of reviews. Because if I had seen Presence when it was released in this January, one of theaters’ notorious down months for new movies, I probably would’ve found its brand of eerie minimalism refreshing. However, watching it after several other, more complex and ambitious ghost movies, something about it couldn’t help but ring a little slight, even if it is another prime example of Steven Soderbergh’s ability to be formally playful and compelling, even when working on a small budget.
It’s never explicitly stated, but you have to assume that all of Presence is seen from the perspective of a ghost living in a once-abandoned house that soon becomes inhabited by a family with two older teenagers. In the first shot of the film, we see the camera float around the house, getting a sense of it before it’s disturbed by human life. Then after a quick showing by a real estate agent, the Payne family moves in, almost solely it seems so that children in the family can go to a good school nearby, which will get them into a good college. The parents in the family, Rebekah (played by Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) seem more consumed by their work than anything, with Rebekah consistently being uninterested in putting in much effort into her personal life, while Chris is consumed by meetings while having hushed phone conversations about some vague legal peril that the two of them may be in.
Then there are the kids in the family, who the camera/ghost spends a little more time focusing on than the parents (though not by a lot). Tyler (Eddy Maday) is a bit of a party boy, often getting high with his friend Ryan (West Mulholland), who eventually becomes interested in Tyler’s sister, Chloe (Callina Liang). Chloe spends the first part of the movie acting pretty sullen, as she had two school friends who recently died. It’s rumored they may have died of an overdose or possibly something more sinister. As the film goes on, Chloe comes a little out of her funk as her and Ryan get to know each other better and start having sex in Chloe’s room, of course with the ghost watching. However, we then start to see that Ryan may be up to no good, all the while the ghost in the house can’t do much to stop these characters from making mistakes.
I forgot to mention that during the course of the Payne family living their ill-fated lives, we do see them reckon with instances of the supernatural. They’re usually little things, such as a collection of books being stacked into a neat pile while one character walks away, or various doors being closed when someone isn’t looking. They’re the kind of mundane things that most people talk about when they talk about encountering ghosts in real life, and for that, I appreciate the movie being so grounded in how subtle most people’s encounters with the paranormal typically go. It also feels weirdly apt to have the ghost be an integral part of the story by having us see the film through their eyes, and yet in the end, there’s not much they can do to help these characters.
I also have to admire the way director Steven Soderbergh creates so much personality and atmosphere with so little, using a handheld camera that’s constantly gliding (to the point where there were times when I got a bit of a headache). But I think the thing I had a hard time with was that there just wasn’t anything in this film that surprised me. Even though I’m not sure I’ve seen a ghost movie quite like this one (though the Paranormal Activity comparisons are easy to make), it still felt like you could guess pretty much everything that happens here. Maybe that’s expecting too much from a film that is at the end of the day, a stylistic experiment. But I felt like it had such a good thing going with its visual style that I wish screenwriter David Koepp had put in a little more effort here. Luckily, Soderbergh and Koepp were given far less limitations with the slicker Black Bag, which also came out this year and turned out to be one of the better studio films of 2025, even if no one saw it. While Presence isn’t quite at that level, it’s still a worthwhile curiosity, and probably even more so if you haven’t spent almost a month thinking about ghost movies.