The idea of Steven Soderbergh directing a movie about a haunting from the ghost’s point of view sounds like a bold experiment. But who is pushing their own boundaries, him or scriptwriter David Koepp?
After all, Koepp spent his three-decade career penning blockbusters from Jurassic Park to Spider-Man before losing his touch with Mortdecai and Dark Universe nonstarter The Mummy. However, horror audiences know for him for turn-of-the-millennium character-driven supernatural shockers like Stir of Echoes and Secret Window. Right now, he’s Soderbergh’s go-to writer – first with 2022’s corporate techno-thriller Kimi, and later this year with spy flick Black Bag. He’s combined that partnership and his horror instincts for Presence, an experiment that feels less of a truly original idea and more like a literary dare – like a film designed to end up on the famous Black List of brilliant but unproduced (and possibly unproduceable) scripts.
Really, it’s not that challenging. Koepp has seemingly studied a very particular kind of ghost flick popular in the early 1980s like The Changeling and Ghost Story, where the house’s resident spirit is merely a symptom of the sins and buried histories of its mortal residents. While all filmed from the silent POV of the unnamed and unseen specter, the story portrayed is really of the family that moves into its house: business executive Rebekah (Liu), her husband Chris (Sullivan), eldest child and mommy’s favorite Ryan (Maday), and daughter Chloe (Liang), who is in mourning for a friend who recently OD’ed. The ghost does little but watch the drama unfold in long takes, interrupted by sudden bursts of black screen.
The ghost’s identity and purpose is slowly revealed through details of what earns its attention. Yet an unfortunate side effect of this long, slow, methodical style, flowing over with longueurs and pauses, is that the eye may be distracted by the house itself. Honestly, Zillow should pay heed to how Soderbergh profiles this delightful two-story New Jersey home because those original fittings are gorgeous, and those illuminated finials on the staircase banister are a huge selling point.
That house porn distraction points to a problem with Presence. Even at a seemingly brisk 85 minutes, Soderbergh’s adding stylistic interest to a whisp of a script. Subplots are present as character notes – criminal malfeasance by Rebekah, Chris’ drinking – but never quite resolved, as if Koepp was overcorrecting after the incessant exposition dumps of his last supernatural drama, 2020’s You Should Have Left. Instead, freelance psychic Lisa (Woolams-Torres) warns it’s all irrelevant to the ghost, which is there to fulfill one destiny before being released from those four walls (which still have the original radiators but my god that kitchen is just too modern).
Yet it’s as much Soderbergh’s fault that the eye is so distracted as it is Koepp’s. The rules of how the ghost operates are established early and feel prosaic – a lot of drifting around, a lot of going up and down stairs, occasionally moving a few small objects, even the standard poltergeist MO of latching on to a teenage girl. The Oscar-winning director missed the opportunity to innovate in presentation. However, both Koepp and Soderbergh are to blame for the underdelivery of a pivotal, plot-defining, single line of dialogue that should have been a strand woven throughout the film.
Instead, in their efforts to add a POV thriller element to David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, it’s all so veil-thin by comparison to much greater contemporary works like The Haunting of Hill House, or innovative indies like Paul Owens’ underseen found footage haunter, LandLocked, or the tragic afterlife anti-romance of Lace Crater. At least the haunted house has great views and is in a top-notch school district.
This article appears in January 24 • 2025.