Presence2025

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

What a disappointment this movie is. Steven Soderbergh is one of our most dependable directors but this movie sits like a missed opportunity that was ill-conceived. The bottom line is the first-person supernatural/ghost perspective lacked emotional heft, human connection, and cinematic thrill. Because Soderbergh chose to use the ghost’s POV, the actors were denied their moment to relay their emotions to the audience. The actors swim about like goldfish in a hundred-year-old suburban home and face each other or stare away from the camera or at the ground, making a connection impossible. What is worse is that in keeping the audience in the ghost’s POV vise we are crippled by Soderbergh’s lack of artifice. Should we really believe that a non-corporeal being—a ghost can’t pass through walls or levitate through floors? This lack of thought is maddening. It’s like being a slow-motion yo-yo in a movie shot by a drone. This man won an Oscar for Traffic, and sure, he wanted to experiment and stretch his creative muscles, but this movie failed in the conceptual phase. This entire movie didn’t have a tenth of the anticipation, heightened tension, and taut suspense of Hitchcock’s 45-second shower murder in Psycho, and that is what is so disappointing. It’s an old axiom that a filmmaker’s job is to make audiences laugh or cry (or at least scare us).

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.