Steven Soderbergh has tried many different things during last several years. Although he announced his decision to retire around the time when he gave us “Side Effects” (2013) and “Behind the Candelabra” (2013), he came back in business with little comedy film “Logan Lucky” (2017), and he has been quite productive since that point as deftly handling a number of various genres ranging from sports drama (“High Flying Bird” (2019)) to psychological thriller (“Kimi” (2022)).

In case of “Presence” (2024), which came out in US not long before his next film “Black Bag” (2025), Soderbergh attempts to tackle a certain horror subgenre, and the result is another interesting genre exercise from him. While the story and characters are quite typical to the core, the movie firmly sticks itself to the omnipresent viewpoint of something hovering around the main characters from the beginning to the end, and we are alternatively fascinated and disturbed to the end of the story.

At the beginning, we get the ambiguously ominous opening scene unfolded via the viewpoint of that unknown entity moving around here and there inside one suburban house. Not long after that, we see a local realtor coming inside the house for checking out its current condition, and then we observe a family looking around the house along with the realtor. Once Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) decide to live in the house, the house is subsequently remodeled a bit by a bunch of workers, and then Chris and Rebekah and their two adolescent children, Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), soon move into their new home.

During their first days, everything seems mostly okay on the surface, but we begin to notice some serious issues inside the family. Rebekah and Chris have been estranged from each other as Rebekah has been trying to cover up whatever she has illegally done at her workplace, and this surely makes Chris quite conflicted about what he should do as a spouse and father. At one point, he tries to get some legal advice from a lawyer friend of his without telling everything, and we can only guess how serious Rebekah’s crime really is.  

Meanwhile, their kids are occupied with each own issues. As a prominent school athlete, Tyler cares more about being popular in their high school, and he does not care a lot about Chloe’s ongoing mental struggle associated with the recent death of her best friend. Her best friend and some other girl died due to some drug overdose, and Chloe is still trying to process her devastating personal loss, but her mother, who usually pays much more attention to her son, mostly disregards that as often saying that time will take care of her daughter’s issue in the end. 

Probably because of her grieving status, Chloe begins to sense the presence of that unknown entity in the house, and the screenplay by David Koepp, who also wrote the screenplay for “Black Bag”, gradually dials up the level of creepiness along the story. We see this unknown entity moving several objects inside Chloe’s bedroom, and then we see Chole being quite perplexed by the resulting difference. When she later gets closer to a friend of Tyler, this seems to anger this unknown entity a lot for some reason, and that is when Chloe becomes more aware of it. 

Steadily maintaining the ambiguity surrounding this unknown entity, the movie expectedly arrives at the point where even Chloe’s family cannot possibly ignore whatever is going inside their house. Fortunately, their realtor happens to have a sister quite sensitive to sort of spiritual energy, and this lady instantly senses something wrong inside the house right from when she and her husband enter the house.

Soderbergh, who also serves as the unofficial editor and cinematographer under pseudonyms as usual, tries an interesting visual approach for emphasizing the omnipresence of this unknown entity. Always functioning as the viewpoint of this unknown entity, his camera fluidly and continuously moves around the spaces occupied by the main characters in the film, and its wide angel lens often accentuates the uncanny situation surrounding them along with the occasionally dramatic score by Zack Ryan. The result is all the more impressive considering that the movie was actually shot in a real house over only 11 days, and Soderbergh also maintains the narrative pacing of the film well via his skillful editing.

Soderbergh’s main cast members do a bit more than filling their respective archetype roles. Callina Liang is definitely a standout as the most sympathetic character in the story, and she is also supported well by her fellow cast members. While Chris Sullivan has a poignant private moment when his character comes to have a honest conversation with Chloe later in the story, Lucy Liu and Eddy Maday are stuck in their rather thankless parts, but Liu manages to overcome this around the end of the film where her frigid character comes to show that she does have a heart to bleed just like her daughter.          

On the whole, “Presence” brings a bit of fresh air to its genre territory, and I was entertained enough by its mood, storytelling, and performance. Although it is a little dryer than many of recent similar horror flicks, it is certainly another fascinating genre piece from one of the best filmmakers in our time, and I am really interested in checking out how Soderbergh and his crew members made it. That is what any well-made movie usually does, isn’t it?