Presence (2025)

Steven Soderbergh has built a career on the pleasure of watching him work, and Presence is a tidy demonstration of the principle. The camera is the ghost. It drifts through a New Jersey house at the height of a child, crouching behind doorframes, climbing the stairs with a steadiness that betrays the operator's rubber soles. The conceit is elegant. The budget was two million dollars, the shoot lasted eleven days, and the whole thing unfolds in a single location. We are watching a master carpenter build a very small, very sturdy cabinet, and it holds a familiar ghost story inside.

The Payne family is interracial, the leads are Asian American, and the film treats all of this as ordinary fact. It is ordinary fact. Nothing in the screenplay pauses to examine it, and nothing asks us to applaud. Lucy Liu's Rebekah is a mother with a favorite child and a white-collar problem she explains away with a shrug. Chris Sullivan's Chris is the softer parent, worried about his grieving daughter. Chloe is sad because her friend died. Tyler, the swimmer, does something genuinely ugly to a classmate, and a young man named Ryan confuses cruelty with control. There is violence against women here. It functions as plot machinery, not as a thesis, and the film never stops to make sure we have drawn the correct conclusion.

Here, then, is a haunted-house picture with no sermons in it. The dead friend, the drugged drinks, the medium who explains the rules of a nonlinear afterlife: all of it serves dread, not doctrine. Soderbergh remains skeptical of ghosts in his private life and treats his fictional one as a formal problem to be solved. The result is a lean and well-made thriller that says almost nothing about the world and a great deal about the man holding the camera. It trusts us to feel something without being told what to feel. I found this restful.

Classification notes: no Academy Awards, no franchise lineage, no source novel, no historical basis, no caped figures, and a sixth-place debut. The thematic ledger stays blank, which is its own small mercy in this climate.

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