Movie Review: 'Presence' is a Brilliantly Experimental Ghost Story

Presence

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by David Koepp

Starring Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, Chris Sullivan

Release Date January 24th, 2025

Published January 25th, 2025

Presence is a wonderfully experimental and ingeniously crafted ghost story that gains an unexpected amount of emotional weight as it builds to stunning final moment that is genuinely surprising and heartbreaking; Director Steven Soderbergh, playing with cinematic form as he’s done throughout his 35 plus year care, has created a brilliantly modern ghost story centered around a family in crisis.

Lucy Liu is the most recognizable in the cast, she stars as Rebecca, a busy business woman who dotes on her teenage son, going as far as choosing a new family home specifically for his benefit. It’s in a school district where Tyler (Eddie Maday) can dominate the swim team and build his college resume. It’s no wonder then that Tyler’s little sister, Chloe (Callina Liang) feels like an afterthought. Thankfully she has a wonderfully doting dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan).

What we know and the family doesn’t is that the house is haunted. An entity floats gracefully through the house. The entirety of the movie will come through the perspective of this floating, gliding, presence. We will only see what the ghost sees. The camera remains entirely in the perspective of this ghost through the whole film and while that might sound jarring, it’s not. The camera rig that Steven Soderbergh has been working on since he made Ocean’s 11 in 2001, is really amazing.

The camera doesn’t shake, it floats gracefully. The camera glides up and down stairs. The camera moves with the speed of a human body freed from the bounds of gravity. Once we have fully settled into this new perspective for a movie, it becomes an essential part of the growing drama in the film. Chloe has, before the action of the movie, suffered a serious trauma, her best friend and another acquaintance died under unique circumstances. Slowly but surely, Chloe begins to believe that the presence in the home may be her friend, Nadia, trying to protect her from something.

We will, eventually, find out who the ghost is but obviously, I am not going to spoil that. I love this movie and I hope you will go and see it for yourself. Presence is an exceptionally crafted film filled with wonderful performances and vivid emotions. With a smart and inventive script by David Koepp, the movie builds its own logical basis for what the ghost is capable of and not capable of, all while never using dialogue to explain the rules of the ghost. This kind of device is trickier than it sounds as it could easily be deployed as a trick or a cheat, but the film is smart enough to get away with it without feeling as if it cut corners on logic.

As I mentioned before, Steven Soderbergh is used to this kind of experimentation in form. Though he’s known for mainstream fare like Erin Brockovich and the Oceans movies, he’s also taken time to make smaller, more experimental movies like Bubble where the idea was to work only with non-actors, and The Girlfriend Experience, starring adult film star Skylar Grey in a performance that should have made her a mainstream star. Grey was incredible in a movie that relies entirely on her actorly magnetism and none of the props and gimmicks of a Hollywood movie. The Girlfriend Experience was made for about $10 bucks with an incredibly small crew and still looks better than a lot of big budget Hollywood movies.

In Presence, the camera may be the star but that doesn’t mean the actors get the short end of the stick. Rather, Soderbergh places a great deal of faith in his actors to overcome the gimmick of the constantly moving camera. And each of the four main characters do an incredible job. The standout is Callina Liang as Chloe whose wonderfully expressive eyes control a number of scenes. Chris Sullivan, from TV’s This is Us, delivers career best work in Presence. His loving doting, sweetheart of a dad is the perfect foil for Lucy Liu’s more distant and distracted character who will be forced out of her complacency as the story races to a stunner of a climax.

Presence is more than just a camera gimmick, it’s a tremendous family drama. While Soderbergh may have been drawn to the idea by the chance to experiment with form, he’s not forgotten why we go to the movies, which is the chance to empathize with characters who we relate to and come to care for. The four main characters of Presence are an average, modern, American family but as they are revealed by the plot, the layers of their lives become clearer and they become people we know and care about deeply, especially as their fates come into question as the story speeds to a conclusion.

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