Rating: R | Runtime: 84 minutes
Release Date: January 24th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Neon
Director(s): Steven Soderbergh
Writer(s): David Koepp

I’m not going in that room.

The title is in the camerawork. From frame one, Steven Soderbergh’s lens (credited as his usual cinematographer/operator pseudonym, Peter Andrews) floats around an empty house without the ability to leave its walls. Are we looking through the eyes of a ghost? If so, whose? That’s the optimal question once Rebekah (Lucy Liu), Chris (Chris Sullivan), and their teen children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang) move in. Because its purpose isn’t to haunt. No, what initially seems like observation soon evolves into a desire to protect.

That’s why Chloe—the first person to notice and interact with it—believes it’s her friend Nadia’s spirit followed her as a guardian angel. Dead as the result of an overdose, this tragedy has stuck with the entire family: half looking to move on (Rebekah and Tyler) while the other hopes to heal (Chris and Chloe). So, it makes sense they’d all be on-edge. That their anxieties place them in a weird headspace with which to try and conjure unexplainable answers to events that aren’t even that out of the ordinary. Chloe doesn’t want to be alone and now, whether true or not, she no longer is.

As David Koepp’s Presence script progresses, however, the question of whether this voyeuristic camerawork is merely aesthetic stops holding water. Pointed looks into the lens can be disregarded as a trick of the mind, but floating books and falling shelves prove much harder to ignore. He and Soderbergh (who also directs) are therefore guiding us as we continue living with this house and its inhabitants. We go from fantasy to legitimacy and danger to support. From the ghost of a previous owner to the memory of a friend to an entity who may not even know its own identity once the concept of nonlinear time is introduced. Rather than someone who did die, this might be someone who will.

That revelation also holds ambiguity by arriving at a moment of narrative discovery that knows we’ll presume an answer a specific that makes too much sense to keep trying to guess other possibilities. Koepp and Soderbergh’s marriage of plot and visuals is shrewd in this way—always building towards a twist with so much evidence pointing one direction that we get distracted from the truth. Because the final reveal demands our surprise for full potency. Not because it isn’t good enough to exist on its own, but because today’s audiences find it difficult to just let go and allow the film to carry them forward devoid of expectations.

It helps that there’s a lot of real-world drama going on with the family outside of this supernatural conceit too. We start seeing the cracks in their foundation and wonder if this ghost is perhaps a distraction of its own shielding us from the bottom falling out in different ways. Rebekah has been party to shady business dealings she fears she isn’t as insulated from as she thought. Chris is struggling to keep his head above water as everyone retreats within themselves to adopt a crueler, more selfish façade. Tyler’s rage has increased so acutely that even his new friend Ryan (West Mulholland) points out the mood swings. And Chloe might be gravitating too close to the spirit to pay attention to worse threats.

Everything we need is there, though. Enough that a second viewing would surely be rewarding on its own by us knowing the truth and watching through that lens. Like how one destructive fit delivered by the ghost wasn’t about making a point to protect victims as much as it was to punish one specific perpetrator. Or how conversations about parents playing favorites or siblings attacking each other more than providing comfort take on different meaning in the sense that the spirit, like us, is listening, processing, and learning to prepare for what’s yet to come. And by infusing the film with the concept of eternalism, we are freed from the knee-jerk desire to chicken-and-egg the result.

In many ways, Presence is constructed with the intention of reminding us about the escapism cinema offers removed from the myriad ways in which social media rewired how our brains consume media. By forcing us into the vantage point of the ghost, we’re more likely to engage with the emotional and psychological toll these characters place on each other (the lead quartet are all great, but Sullivan truly astounds in this regard) instead of using them to “solve” the usual haunted house us-versus-them dynamic. We align with the ghost, imploring it to act how it ultimately acts, to become an integral part of the experience. We’re wading through the chaos to do what’s right and discover our identity by finally looking into that mirror, knowing our purpose had been achieved.

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Callina Liang (Chloe) in PRESENCE directed by Steven Soderbergh. Photo by Peter Andrews. Copyright: The Spectral Spirit Company.