This story may contain spoilers.
It’s not enough to say that horror’s having a moment. Even if I do not go on to list Backrooms, Obsession, Weapons, Together and Sinners (all 2025) and … you’ll know what I mean. After attempts to revitalise a genre where arresting the viewer’s attention correctly often yields high dividends, for a decade, English-language films seem to have realised that ghosts are all the same—it is ghostliness that must differ.
The raison d’être for horror is we want to be scared. It’s about being taken out of your body for the most thrills. Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, released in 2024 and streaming on Amazon Prime Video now, expanded the meaning of horror for me by opening up another dimension to that fear. It did so by giving the supernatural the most quotidian experience. The closer the scary is to the everyday, the scarier it is.
Presence follows a supernatural force existing alongside a family that moves into a New Jersey suburb. There’s family drama here—a Type A mom (Lucy Liu in fine form), her wound-up white husband (Chris Sullivan) consumed by the pursuit of sanity in a family where it seems to have been perpetually missing, and their two teenagers with issues of their own (Callina Liang and Eddy Maday).
The best horror films innovate—in Curry Barker’s generation-defining Obsession, the plot mangles the expectations of romance to deliver a psychological ordeal that’s the exact opposite of romance. In Rosemary’s Baby, one of my favourite films, the systematic destruction of Rosemary’s (Mia Farrow) innocence undoes her sense of sanity and control in a way that feels suffocatingly torturous.
Presence doesn’t aim very high but it gets where it’s headed. Soderbergh, who has directed and served as the cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) on this film, manages to create a sense of isolation early into the film. Right from the opening sequence, the POV of the Presence moves restlessly up and down the staircase, watching the family move in from windows. It follows them around, eavesdrops on their conversation, gets shut out of the porch when somebody walks out. In addition to not existing in time in the same way as human consciousness, like the psychic who visits the house later in the film says, it’s a wordless and ageless blip whose only proof of existence is the camera telling us so.
The dysfunctional urban family are so messed up—individually in and in their interpersonal dynamics—that the invisible Presence begins to seem like the only one in its right mind. It’s not a malevolent spirit: it just lingers, sometimes gets into their immediate personal space (but it seems to have an invisible physical form that bars it from going through physical barriers), and attempts to create a connection with Chloe, the teenage daughter of the couple.
Meanwhile, Ryan, the douche-jock friend of Tyler, the swim-team-champ son, starts visiting and leering at Chloe, who uses the refuge of casual teenage sex to cope. He starts a relationship with her that gets increasingly uncomfortable to watch, with his manipulative sensitive-boy act and the spiel that he repeats like a hypnosis mantra: “You’re in control”. It turns out that this pathetic grooming routine is his shtick to date-asphyxiate young women, two of whom have been Chloe’s now-dead friends.
For brief periods, all of this feels somewhat convenient as a plot device and a flattish treatment of Ryan’s character. Even an a**wipe like him gets a raw deal with all the stereotyping he seems to be taking in his characterisation. But the other way to see it is the trauma of Chloe and all the incidents with her friends’ deaths that have led up to it. Presence then becomes a timeline-agnostic perspective to that disturbing reality (more on that in the film).
Some of the criticism that has come its way would have been true had this been a film by a lesser filmmaker. But Soderbergh’s conceits go beyond plot. His last outing, Black Bag, was a slick marriage story with the contours of an espionage drama. In Unsane, he followed the harrowed mind of a woman imprisoned in a mental facility against her will.
A lot of viewers have pointed out that this is not so much of a horror film as it is a drama. I’m not getting into that conversation but what Soderbergh does masterfully is working with a lot of tension, as was the case with Unsane, his 2018 iPhone-shot thriller with Claire Foy. Likewise, Presence is a ghost story about familial fissures and grief. This family, where normalcy is only in the kind of relationship the father is trying to have with the children, emotion is a ghost. Only when the last vestige of any hope in it is lost, is it realised that it has been lost. You’ll probably understand what I’m talking about when you watch it.