In 2025, there’s something almost quaint about the idea of a straight-ahead haunted house movie. Leave it to Steven Soderbergh – an indie cinema trailblazer with a penchant for visual and structural experimentation – to play with the formula.
The central conceit of Presence is that it’s a ghost story from the perspective of the ghost. For the entirety of Presence, we are silently gliding through a newly renovated two-storey home, witnessing the story of the Payne family – Rebekah (Lucy Liu), her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and their two kids Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). It’s a unique dynamic; the fragmented storytelling is absorbing and engaging, and there is a sense that this film is trusting the audience a lot more than a lot of contemporary horror movies do.
At first, only Chloe is aware of the titular presence. We learn that the recent death of a friend has left her depressed and lost, more open to the spiritual world. We also learn of marital strife and sibling discord, partially rooted in the disconcerting relationship between Rebeka and her son.
Presence, by design, puts us at a slight distance from the action, which is fine at first as the pieces gradually start to come together. This might end up hampering the movie as its myriad plot points can’t find a way to resolve within the restriction that the movie has set for itself. The characters don’t seem to ever quite jell, and as such some of the darker moments within the film come across as either saccharine or as clumsily moralising.
For a horror movie, that’s not ideal, and perhaps the most disappointing thing about Presence is that it’s not really scary. When we talked about ghost movies a lot of the discussion centered around the nature of the ghost as a figure of sympathy and anguish, and that’s certainly true here. The spirit’s actions are reactive, righteous, and hardly ever threatening because of the audience’s (sort of) omniscience.
It’s too apparent sometimes that the film’s conceit is struggling to keep up with the push to establish a satisfying narrative.
Compared to another recent perspective-flip, 2024’s avant-slasher In a Violent Nature, an incorporeal spirit presents something maybe too passive to carry a film, particularly when for a majority of the film’s runtime the identity of the spectre is a mystery. Ultimately, it’s the solidly-acted family drama that is more interesting than unraveling the exact nature of the house’s spiritual occupant.
None of that is to say that Presence is a disaster. There are some moments of genuine tension stemming from Chloe’s budding relationship with Ryan (West Mulholland) that explores emotional and sexual manipulation in a surprisingly frank way. It’s just that we didn’t really need to be inhabiting a ghost to see that story unfold.
Ultimately Presence is a relatively breezy 85 minutes, and a fitfully interesting film experience – there’s genuinely not much else that looks and feels like this movie does. The problem is that it seems like too much has been hung on the nature of its construction and its actual story has been left by the wayside, particularly at the conclusion. Unfortunately, what’s revealed doesn’t feel particularly inventive, edifying or shocking, even if it is trying something new.