Steven Soderbergh’s Presence radically subverts the haunted house genre

When Steven Soderbergh publicly retired back in 2013, the filmmaker behind movies including Sex, Lies & Videotape, Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich warned us: “The problem is that cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.” He was right – too often now it feels as if we’ve all crowded around, morbidly curious, to watch cinema’s last, ragged breaths.

He then unretired, almost immediately. But this wasn’t a late-night text to a just-dumped ex, this was a return on new, concreted terms, the kind you’d wish every great director could indulge in. Soderbergh, now, exclusively makes films fuelled by the joy of making films. They prod at the form. They remain curious, even in their failures. His latest, Presence, shares a fair amount in common with Unsane (2018) and Kimi (2022) – clean, simple premises tied primarily to a single location, yet giddy with possibility.

Here, it’s a flipped perspective on the haunted house story. We’re the ghost. Or the camera’s the ghost. Either way, we’re both voyeur and active participants in the narrative, as we watch a family of four move into a beautiful, historic home only to slowly realise there’s a fifth occupant they haven’t accounted for.

Screenwriter David Koepp (who also collaborated with Soderbergh on Kimi and the forthcoming spy thriller Black Bag), leans into the fragmented nature of ghostdom. We’re introduced to Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan), plus kids Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday), via their glamorously persuasive realtor (Julia Fox). Yet the following scenes don’t quite line up in a conventional manner; we fade in and out of consciousness and wander between rooms, drawn in by the sounds of whispering voices.

Presence is a ghost story. But it’s also about the smaller, symbolic deaths that occur while we still breathe, when family bonds start to crack and dissolve. The disconnect between mother and daughter is excruciatingly obvious. Rebekah doesn’t hide her favouritism towards her star-athlete son, and Liu performs such mundane cruelty with a slick, faux-carelessness. She expels her manipulations as if they were the most natural thing in the world.

But the advantage of being dead here is that the viewer, Soderbergh’s camera (which he operates himself, credited under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews”), can move smoothly between each of the private, fenced-off worlds within this family. Chris, who typically presents himself as a gentle, jovial figure, steps outside to take a call. We linger at the window. Ghost rules, of course, don’t permit us to leave the house. He hints to a friend about a damaging secret, then collapses into a chair, his mask slipping, to confess that, really, he’s not OK at all.

Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is: in the puppyish yearning as they rush up to greet the family after too much time alone; in the strange sadness in the air when Chris asks the kids for their burrito order, and you wonder if our ghost misses the taste of food; in the way everything trembles when they try to communicate, to finally connect. It’s a funny film, too (“Since when did you smoke?” “2003”), and never quite as tonally grim as its story implies. Yet its lesson is uncompromising: life is lonely, and it only gets lonelier after you die.

Dir: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: Lucy Liu, Julia Fox, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Lucas Papaelias, West Mulholland, Eddy Maday. Cert 15, 85 mins

‘Presence’ is in cinemas from 24 January