Steven Soderbergh spooks Sundance with the haunting (and surprisingly funny) Presence

Steven Soderbergh never appears on screen in Presence, but he essentially plays the main character.

The 61-year-old filmmaker shoots his lean haunted house flick, which premiered to a packed late-night crowd at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, as the titular ghost, zooming around an old suburban house on silent, invisible feet. Before long, a new family will move in, kickstarting a twisty tale of unexplained occurrences, but when the film begins, the house is empty. The first thing we see is from the perspective of the presence itself, as the camera wanders through empty rooms and peers through slatted closet doors.

Soderbergh is famous for pulling double if not triple duty on many of his films, often serving as his own editor and cinematographer under the pseudonyms Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Andrews. Here, he does the same, but Presence doesn’t just place him in the middle of the action. Instead, his camera is the action, watching and influencing the Payne family like a particularly nosy roommate.

The house’s unlucky residents include mom Rebecca (Lucy Liu), dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), son Tyler (Eddy Maday), and daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). When they first tour the home with its gorgeous woodwork and high ceilings, the domineering Rebecca jumps at such a good deal in such a good school district. After move-in day, however, it’s Chloe who first senses that it might not be the picture-perfect HGTV dream house they anticipated. The high schooler is reeling from a recent tragedy herself, having lost her best friend Nadia to an unexpected overdose.

Presence embraces many of your typical haunted house hallmarks: the flickering lights, the puffs of air, the random shattering glassware. But despite its horror trappings, the film is more of a taut character drama, a single-location nightmare that chronicles the Payne family’s unraveling. Part of the fun is watching Presence’s plot unfold slowly, like leafing through a carefully curated family photo album. Soderbergh and writer David Koepp drip-feed revelations about the Paynes' past. In a post-premiere Q&A, Koepp explained that when he first put pen to paper, Soderbergh’s only instruction was that the story center on a family that’s “really f---ed up.” They may be able to keep secrets from one another, but they can’t hide from the specter skulking nearby.

Some scenes are only a few seconds, and others stretch on for ages, as the camera zooms around the house, peering out of windows and over shoulders. Sometimes Soderbergh’s camera lingers on the other side of a room, passively watching the Paynes as they go about their daily lives. At other times, it creeps up on characters until it’s nearly touching them, to the point where you can almost see hairs raising on the backs of necks.

As haunted house stories go, Presence is more interested in lurking dread than bloody jump scares, slowly ratcheting up the tension with long, uninterrupted takes. It’s also surprisingly funny: Julia Fox has a brief but memorable role as the house’s chipper real estate agent, and as the strain rises, Liu and Sullivan trade barbs that are both cutting and comedic. (It’s worth seeing with a full crowd, just to experience all the collective gasps and nervous laughter.) The result is the kind of haunting ghost story that’ll linger with you long after you’ve closed the front door. Grade: A-

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