Presence review | Soderbergh goes spooky for haunted house fable

presence review
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Steven Soderbergh offers us a gripping family saga masquerading as a ghost story. Here’s our Presence review. 


Judging from the trailers and the marketing, you’d expect the first of two movies directed by Steven Soderbergh gracing our screens in 2025 to be a horror film. It certainly fits the bill on paper: a family moves into a new house where a supernatural entity roams the rooms and stairs, observing the new residents’ lives and occasionally dropping a shelf or two. 

Yet, I can’t say I was scared once during Presence. I was compelled and glued to my seat, but not for the usual reasons while watching a horror film. 

Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) move their two kids, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday) to a new house. Chloe is grieving the loss of her best friend, Nadia, and begins to sense a presence in the house. Could it be Nadia? As you might expect, weird stuff starts happening. 

Presence is filmed completely from the point of view of the entity. The free-flowing camera moves around the house, following our characters and occasionally gazing outside but never able to leave the premises. It quickly forms a protective relationship with Chloe, often hiding in her closet. There’s a very distinct sense of sadness that’s never really explored, which somehow makes it even more persistent. 

presence
Credit: Picturehouse Entertainment

Soderbergh is known for experimenting with style in his films. 2018’s Unsane was filmed completely with an iPhone, as was High Flying Kite. In recent years, though, the director has struggled to capture the magic of his previous films, especially in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a terrible third entry into a franchise that has always been refreshingly original and authentic. Presence is a return to form for the Traffic director and, even with its obvious flaws, represents an exciting new chapter in his filmography. 

Soderbergh’s film is more of a drama that turns into a thriller towards the end than a horror feature. It doesn’t even try to be one, but Presence will most likely suffer from being marketed as something scary and unfathomable and then leaving you high and dry. If you’re willing to go with its flow though, it’s a gripping story about a family trying to come together in crisis, both supernatural and the regular kind. The fly-on-the-wall approach allows for the action to unfold naturally and without too much involvement or manipulation from Soderbergh. 

Read more: The top 45 must-see films of 2025

David Koepp’s script is weighed down by your usual haunted house cliches. The family hires a psychic to come visit the house and she mysteriously sighs “it’s confused” ā€“ as if we didn’t already gather that from watching it float around the house for 45 minutes. Rebekah and Chris’ marriage is falling apart, Tyler is the favourite child but also a bit of an arse, while Chloe tends to fade into the background, but nothing much comes from all of this. 

Despite the beautiful cinematography, Presence also adopts a strange stop-and-go style of editing, partly out of necessity. Most scenes are simply cut to black before a new scene starts, which takes a bit of getting used to, and the flowy, eerie cinematography is sometimes undone by the sudden cuts. Soderbergh, credited as the film’s cinematographer, makes the most of his single location and the constantly moving camera makes the space feel vast and interesting rather than limited. 

There are shades of David Lowery’s memorable A Ghost Story, but Presence largely fails to make its brief 85 minutes matter. Sure, you could read the entity as some sort of metaphor for the family’s misery, but Soderbergh takes the easiest route here. Presence is still hugely entertaining, and at times it even manages to inject some humour and self-awareness into its premise, but there’s a constant, gnawing sense that there was more to be done with this, more potential to fulfil. 

But Presence is still refreshingly original, even though its ending descends into needless melodrama and theatricality which feel somewhat out of place in a film that otherwise values subtlety. This is where the film gets scary ā€“ but not for the reason you’d expect.

Presence is in UK cinemas 24th January. 

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