Is “Presence” Another Gimmick By Soderbergh, Or A Refreshing Ghost Story? | Review

Naturally, I approach films that may have a gimmick hidden behind them with great suspicion. For this reason, I had mixed expectations of “Presence” by the esteemed American director Steven Soderbergh. In every discussion of the film, someone mentioned that it is filmed entirely from the perspective of a ghost, a format that we have already learned can be problematic because it can quickly turn out to be a gimmick that exhausts itself. But Soderbergh is an interesting filmmaker; the film received excellent reviews around the world, and ghost films are my favorite subgenre in horror cinema, mainly because such films can be suspenseful and scare the hell out of me.

Perhaps for these reasons, I allowed myself to miss “Presence” when it was in theaters, and I was content to watch it at home, hoping that the ghosts that may exist in my house would sit down to watch the film with me. The truth is that the film left me very confused and mainly with a feeling of disappointment. Although the general idea is cool, and Soderbergh incorporates some fascinating ideas, I’m not sure the film justifies itself as more than a conceptual idea, certainly not a horror film. In the following review, you will understand how and why.

A Regular Ghost Movie, With A Twist: What Is The Movie Presence About?

“Presence” begins with a wander through the empty house, which, together with the prior knowledge, allows us to understand from the initial stage that this is the point of view of a ghost. Then, in a terrifying scene, we are exposed to the Presence of the malicious and threatening entity, which will lure unhappy people into the house and send them to doom to make personal profit at their expense. This is the real estate agent, played by the model Julia Fox (Kanye West’s rather provocative ex, who came out a few years ago and is also known for her fondness for painting with blood).

Ah, it turns out that the realtor is not the real story for some reason here, and except for that scene in the opening, she won’t return to us. The protagonists are the Payne family, who are average and quite boring, to be honest. They arrive at the house, looking to start a new chapter in their lives. The mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu, “Charlie’s Angels,” “Kill Bill,” “Chicago”), is a mother who doesn’t really function, does suspiciously criminal acts that we don’t fully understand, and also tends to repeat things people say to her for some reason. The father (the excellent Chris Sullivan, Toby from the hit TV series “This Is Us”) is a pretty generic father, sensitive that his wife ignores him. The eldest son, Tyler (Eddie Madey, in his first film), is a handsome college student and a certified swimmer, Every mother’s dream. And then there’s the main character, the girl Chloe (Callina Liang, “Bad Genius,” “Tell Me Everything”), who the family – especially the older brother and the mother – don’t care about. In between, we learn that two girls she knows from school, one of whom is her best friend Nadia, recently died from a toxic substance.

Very quickly, the daughter realizes that something unnatural lives in this house. At first, it seems like a wet dream, at least for me, when the ghost arranges her notebooks in the room (Why didn’t my realtor offer me a house like this? Damn bitch!) and protects her from Ryan (West Mulholland, “Dark Harvest”), a popular guy who becomes Tyler’s best new friend. His popularity is because he distributes banned materials to students, and mainly because he speaks complex sentences with no logical connection or internal logic between their words, which probably says something about Generation Z or just expresses a loose script. This is a rather disappointing fact because legendary screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “War of the Worlds,” “Mission: Impossible”) took on the task. Seriously, there were a few scenes of Ryan’s monologues that I had to watch several times to understand what the hell he was trying to say.

Viewing The World Through The Ghost’s Eyes

“Presence” is a ghost movie with a pretty generic plot: you see, a family moving into a new house (because in a horror movie, the essential requirement for finding a profitable real estate property is ghosts,) a daughter who notices before anyone else that something strange is going on, a family who at first doesn’t understand what it wants from her, and a few scenes that we’ve come to expect that indicate a supernatural presence in the house. You know, destruction and ruin in certain rooms (it turns out that our OCD ghost wants to create a mess to clean up later), opening doors, hiding in closets, breathing on people, and so on.

The main twist is that we see these actions from the ghost’s perspective, which, in some cases, will also leave the scene (say, a conversation between the family members) and carry out its plot. “Presence” is not the first movie to present a particular character’s point of view, even if traditionally, we only got to see a few scenes and not an entire film that plays on the idea. This. Some classic examples are the transformation scene in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” from 1931, which we see from the hero’s perspective, through a mirror, or the voyeuristic scene that opens Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.” We recently reviewed “Wolf Man” here, where several scenes present the character’s transformation into a werewolf from his perspective, including the effect on different senses. You can find other scenes with the same idea in films from various genres, such as an excellent scene in the hugely disappointing “Doom,” which tries to convey the experience of a first-person shooter to the screen.

Making an entire film from this perspective is something else, even if there have been a few cases in the past. Note that we are not referring to Found Footage films here, although, in them, we also see the story through the protagonist’s character with an intermediary such as a camera or cellphone because it is a slightly different story. We have already written on the site about Robert Montgomery’s “Lady in the Lake” from 1947, where the choice was to present the film from the perspective of detective Philip Marlowe in an attempt to recall the tone of the books. The film failed and has been analyzed in many ways, with one of the conclusions being that the choice made it difficult for viewers to identify with the character, that they had not seen most of the film. There were examples from action films (such as “Hardcore Henry” from 2015, which also simulates a first-person shooter game) and recently also an entire horror film, this time a slasher – the Canadian “In a Violet Nature,” which we see through the eyes of a serial killer in the woods, who kills young people in creative ways, but most of the time simply walks in the woods and watches them.

Let’s return to “Presence,” where the main question is whether the format reinvents anything. The answer is complex, and I’m not sure it’s positive. In most cases, the film’s different point of view didn’t add a dimension of suspense or horror, in my opinion, because we’re just seeing the scenes we would have seen anyway from roughly the same angle, with a slightly distorted lens (at least it’s better than the camera shaking for no reason in Found Footage films). There were a few instances where the format justified itself and added a new dimension to the film, but they were few. The feeling was that the film was repetitive in terms of the construction of the scenes, some of which felt unnecessary. A few moments did work, mainly around the characters’ awareness that they had a ghost next to them, but also some that didn’t (some of the scares, apparently).

Of course, sticking to a ghost’s point of view can also raise a philosophical and theological discussion about the meaning of life. Indeed, during the film, I wondered what it even means to be a ghost. Can’t a ghost walk through walls because, in a specific scene, the son slams the door in her face, and it seems to become clueless? When does the ghost lift various objects, and when does it stand still and use her mind, or whatever, to make things around her move? Can a ghost open a refrigerator and eat stuff from it? And most importantly, does a ghost need to visit the bathroom now and then?

A Short Film That Feels Long? Something Went Wrong Here

Perhaps the biggest problem is that “Presence” didn’t sweep me away, and it was undoubtedly far from scary: despite being a film about ghosts, there’s no overly tense atmosphere here, and there are almost no jump scares or other scares. You can see it as a family drama with ghosts, perhaps similar to the sad “Ghost Story” with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara from 2017.

My feeling, which also came up in reviews about the film, is that it is sometimes stretched or dull. When this happens in a movie that is freaking 85 minutes long, it is clear that something is not working on the screenplay and plot level. There were a few scenes that were difficult to pull off, mainly due to strange monologues and dialogues by one of the characters (if you see the film, you will understand who this is about), or scenes in which we accompany the ghost up and down the stairs, looking in the windows and doing other things that ghosts probably do, in long takes as the film’s format requires. The film’s pace is uneven, and it is difficult to say that it builds itself effectively toward the climax, which was too little and too late for me.

The film deals with a family in crisis, shaky relationships between the parents and between them and the children (mainly, the mother who does not count the daughter, unlike the more sensitive father), loss, loneliness, and the like. The problem is that the medium here affects the message and how we can explore these issues with the family. Sticking to the ghost may seem refreshing on paper, but it also has drawbacks in practice. This is similar to the alien invasion film “No One Will Save You,” where the writer of these lines felt that the gimmick of a dialogue-free film hurt the film more than it helped it.

In general, I found the development of some of the characters or relationships in the family unit lacking, as well as the backstory. Because we stick to the ghost’s point of view, our knowledge as viewers is limited. Some of the characters’ actions, as do their choices, seem random to us.

The Procedure Worked, But The Ghost Is Dead

It’s not that “Presence” is a bad film. The acting of most of the actors is satisfactory, there are well-crafted scenes, and the cinematography is successful (Soderbergh filmed the film himself, under one of his pen names, camera names, or whatever it may be). The ending is decent, even if you can foreguess the twist.

The revelation of the circumstances of the characters’ deaths in the backstory and the ghost’s identity may not be particularly original because we have seen other films with a similar idea. Still, it does manage to upgrade the movie and connect a few dots. To the director’s credit, perhaps for the first time in cinema history, he found a logical explanation for the plot for the camera-flying-towards-the sky-above-a-house ending scene. Still, I will not go into detail about it so as not to give away spoilers.

Look, I am being too modest to criticize Steven Soderbergh, one of the most important and busy creators in cinema (mainly independent) in recent decades, a director who won an Oscar (for “Traffic”) and quite a few other awards. “Presence” is well-made in many parts; you can see that whoever is here knows their job. On the other hand, it stood out to me that this is not a horror artist but someone who moves between genres, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, and also chooses to make cinematic experiments from time to time, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. My primary concern was that it was a gimmick, a film whose importance could be summed up in one line (say, “an entire ghost movie from the perspective of a ghost”), perhaps in the same way that his 2018 “Unsane” was defined mainly as “an entire movie shot on an iPhone.” It did not innovate too much in other ways.

So, in the end, “Presence” remains an enigma to me. A film that is more reminiscent of the expression, “The operation was a success, but the patient died.” At least when it happened, we got a ghost movie here that may not be particularly enjoyable. It certainly does not break boundaries, but it does offer some interesting ideas and a story with meaning.

Presence (2024) – Frequently Asked Questions

Who directed Presence? Highly acclaimed and Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh.

Who plays in Presence? The cast of Presence includes Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, and Julia Fox.

Who wrote Presence? David Koepp, one of the well-known screenwriters in recent decades, wrote the script.

How long is the movie Presence? The running time of the film is 85 minutes.

When was Presence filmed? The movie was filmed in a house in Cranford, New Jersey. Principal photography took only 11 days, according to reports.

What languages can we hear in the film? English, but it has some host Breaths as well.

When was Presence released to cinemas? The film was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival on 19th January 2025. It was released to cinemas a few days later, on 24th January.

What was the budget of Presence? The estimated budget for the film is as little as $2 million.

How much did the movie gross across the globe? The film earned approximately $10.5 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

What are the ratings of Presence?

On IMDB, it has a rating of 6.1 out of 10.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the weighted score of positive reviews is 88%.

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