PRESENCE. A Horror from a Ghost’s Perspective

Few people remember it today, but Steven Soderbergh’s adventure with cinema began around the same time as Quentin Tarantino’s. Both won the Palme d’Or as young filmmakers with only one or two films to their names. Soderbergh achieved this at the age of 26 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Tarantino did it at 31 with Pulp Fiction in 1994. Both were associated with the Weinstein brothers’ Miramax, both were seen as the wunderkinds of American independent cinema—great hopes were pinned on them, and they were predicted to have brilliant careers. However, their paths took dramatically different directions. Simply put, you could say that Tarantino prioritized quality, while Soderbergh focused on quantity. While the Reservoir Dogs director has released just nine films in theaters, the Traffic director has churned out 37 feature films (an impressive number, and still growing). Tarantino quickly found his formula for filmmaking: sharp dialogue, violence, and dark humor became his trademarks. Soderbergh, on the other hand, is not so easy to pin down. His filmography is a true mishmash—big-budget blockbusters made for major studios alongside low-budget indie projects, Oscar-winning hits alongside films forgotten by both God and audiences, experimental collaborations with streaming platforms, and movies shot entirely on an iPhone. If there is anything that unifies his work, it is a constant urge to experiment—leading to, let’s be honest, highly varied artistic results. With such a high work rate, that’s inevitable—sometimes it’s brilliant, sometimes it’s not. Luckily, Presence belongs to the first category.

Soderbergh’s new film is easy to market with just one phrase: a horror movie from a ghost’s perspective. For 85 minutes, the camera—operated by the director himself—mimics the point of view of a spirit haunting a house. The ghost moves seamlessly between rooms, observing the daily lives of the residents. And there’s plenty to observe. A four-person family with tumultuous relationships moves into an elegant home. Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) have a marriage hanging by a thread—the sensitive, bearded Chris is fed up with his domineering, career-driven wife who controls everything around her. Their son, Tyler (Eddy Maday), is a spoiled athlete who excels in sports but lacks empathy, especially toward his sister. Then there’s Chloe (Callina Liang), a withdrawn teenager dealing with fresh trauma—just weeks earlier, her best friend was found dead with a lethal dose of drugs in her system. Chloe is the first—and for a long time, the only one—to sense the presence of the ghost. Driven by instinct, she decides to try to communicate with it.

The ghost’s identity becomes clear within the first few minutes—Soderbergh doesn’t aim for a surprise reveal in that regard. What Presence does offer, however, is a melancholic atmosphere, a complete rejection of classic haunted house horror tropes. It’s a horror film in the same way that David Lowery’s A Ghost Story was. The ghost here serves a similar purpose—as an observer with minimal influence over reality, the perfect voyeur, invisible and thus free from the risk of exposure. The real pleasure of watching Presence comes from this act of voyeurism, which is at the heart of cinema itself—we slip into the ghost’s “skin,” seeing the world through its omnipresent “eyes.”

The film’s narrative is highly fragmented: we receive only pieces of scenes, often taken out of context, scattered like a puzzle. “Ghosts don’t perceive reality linearly, through time and space,” explains a medium brought into the house, justifying the film’s unconventional storytelling. It’s up to us to reconstruct the relationships between the characters, fill in the blanks, and ultimately solve the mystery—because in the final act, Presence shifts sharply toward thriller/crime territory, almost as if contradicting itself. The genre instincts of screenwriter David Koepp (a longtime collaborator of Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg) take over. It’s a bit of a shame—Presence is at its best when it subverts expectations, posing as uncompromising arthouse cinema.

Ultimately, Soderbergh’s film succeeds for one simple reason: he knows how to make effective use of the first-person perspective. For many filmmakers, similar experiments have been a creative death sentence. The first full-length attempt at this technique came from Robert Montgomery’s 1947 noir Lady in the Lake, but 90 minutes from the perspective of Philip Marlowe proved too much for audiences at the time. Later attempts weren’t much better—whether it was the video game-inspired Hardcore Henry or the intriguing but exhausting Copper (Les Lyonnais), with the exception of Gaspar Noé’s hypnotic Enter the Void. What sets Soderbergh apart is that his use of POV is more than just a stylistic gimmick—it’s a fundamental storytelling device, carefully considered and, most importantly, justified by the film’s narrative.