

Movie Reviews
Presence ★★★★
Released: 24th January 2025
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Callina Liang, Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland & Julia Fox
American protean Steven Soderbergh has been an unbelievable force of nature throughout his career. From the swooningly romantic works of Out Of Sight and Sex Lies and Videotape, to his utterly humanist and intimate Solaris adaption, melding into the world of kinetic iPhone frenzy with Unsane, all the way through to the masterful and touching Magic Mike: The Last Dance, The Girlfriend Experience and Erin Brockovich as well as his most well-known work on the Oceans trilogy. Steven Soderbergh has always been the most fantastically successful experimental auteur among the box-office landscape. Soderbergh’s plethora of work has ranged from interrogating American capitalism, to diving head first into the human-experience and exploring sensuality vs sexuality, so make no mistake that Presence is an incredible addition to Soderbergh’s already remarkably diverse filmography.
Shot entirely from the point of view of a spiritual entity, or ghost (for want of a better word), an American Asian family move into their new suburban home and become convinced that there is an entity haunting them. Using his ingenuity and understanding of space, most prevalent in his formally ambitious pandemic thriller Contagion, Soderbergh appears to understand the interiority of an environment, most interestingly — the familial space. A landscape fuelled with difficulty, struggle, intimacy and love. Soderbergh utilises his formal sensibilities in capturing this domestic arena with relentless ingenuity. Serving, classically, as his own Director of Photography under the pseudonym ‘Peter Andrews’, his own fathers name, as well as his own editor, Soderbergh is clinical and unbelievably precise over Presence’s eighty-five minute runtime. Cut almost like an early Harmony Korine feature, most notably Julian Donkey-Boy comes to mind, or even more precariously, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, Presence does initially begin with feeling like a formal exercise and analysis of the camera’s ability to capture point of view, spectatorship, voyeurism and gaze. The film cuts between scenes, that play out between the family, with the entity following both individuals, by following and gliding through their domestic space with them, as well as capturing the family all together in different areas of their household.
Lucy Liu plays Rebecca, a shady, tech-obsessed mum who is overtly supportive of her athletic, swimmer son Tyler (Eddy Maday). Chris Sullivan plays what can only be described as the omniscient father, a dad fuelled with empathy, understanding and care for his family with Callina Liang beautifully embodying Chloe, a struggling teenage girl. Chloe has become understandably introverted and anxious after the tragic death of her close friend Nadia, but it is Chloe herself who can most prominently feel (and connect with) this presence in her families home. Both Chloe and her brother Tyler befriend popular local student Ryan (West Mulholland), who becomes increasingly malevolent in his actions as the film reaches its emotionally draining finale.

The continual point of view experience offers the spectator a uniquely concentrated exposure to the interiority of familial dynamics, the structure of perspective and maybe most interestingly, the individuals relationship to the entity and the camera. Although, regrettably, Soderbergh’s flowing structure is slightly dislodged by David Koepp’s need for a throughline in his scriptwriting. Whilst the film does offer some truly beautiful, personal moments between individuals and family members, there are certainly instances where the script detracts from Soderbergh’s devotion to his formal set-up. It may have actually been the case that Presence could have been been purely an all-encompassing audio-visual experience and instead is slightly blighted by some of its bizarre script and narrative choices.
It is without question that Steven Soderbergh is one of the most formally ambitious, emotionally resonant American auteurs currently working, but to further accentuate this sentiment his body of work has certainly cemented himself as one of the finest artists to grace the cinematic arena. The sheer artistic bravado, the passionate tales of love and loss and his chameleonic ability to reshape genre is a testament to the accomplished nature of craftsmanship.
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