Film
01.24.25
Presence Melissa Anderson

Domestic misery loves spectral company in
Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller.

Callina Liang as Chloe in Presence. Courtesy Neon.

Presence, directed by Steven Soderbergh,
now in theaters

•   •   •

A taut, confident, superbly executed paranormal thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has its share of jump scares. But its dread emerges not so much from occult phenomena as from its keen probing of the rot of nuclear families and the sepsis of alpha-male behavior. Like the best of the prolific filmmaker’s work over the past fifteen years (Magic Mike, Side Effects, Logan Lucky, High Flying Bird), Presence is a genre film invigorated by astute, nondidactic social studies.

Callina Liang as Chloe, Chris Sullivan as Chris, Eddy Maday as Tyler, Lucy Liu as Rebekah, and Julia Fox as Cece in Presence. Courtesy Neon. Photo: Peter Andrews. © The Spectral Spirit Company.

Except for the final seconds, the camera in Presence never leaves its setting, a century-old, two-story house in leafy suburbia (the film was shot in New Jersey). The camera, in fact, serves as a main character: Presence is conveyed from the point of view of the specter inhabiting the home. (For the use of this technique alone, Soderbergh’s movie would make for a fascinating double bill with RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, which also deploys the subjective camera. As is his custom, Soderbergh, using pseudonyms, additionally served as both cinematographer and editor for Presence.) Before dawn, the camera/ghost roves from room to empty room, scurrying up and down stairs in long, fluid takes. It calmly observes the real-estate agent (a cameoing Julia Fox) who arrives seconds before her first potential buyers of the day, a family consisting of Rebekah (Lucy Liu); her husband, Chris (Chris Sullivan); and their teenage kids, Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). With great economy, this scene establishes the quartet’s gestalt: Rebekah makes all the decisions (she immediately wants—and gets—the house), Chris both admires and resents his spouse’s imperiousness, Tyler stands aloof and entitled, Chloe possesses a curiosity that outweighs her fragility.

Chris Sullivan as Chris and Lucy Liu as Rebekah in Presence. Courtesy Neon. Photo: Peter Andrews. © The Spectral Spirit Company.

Once the family is fully installed, they are espied in media res, their midstream conversations offering oblique but tantalizing details. Who, for instance, is the dead girl Chris keeps referring to, and what was her relationship to Chloe? What, exactly, does chief breadwinner Rebekah do, and why is her spouse consumed with anxiety about her profession? Why does Rebekah worship her cocksure, bullying son while barely disguising her contempt for her delicate daughter? How much is Chris enabling those of his wife’s behaviors and actions that he claims to abhor? These scenes of everyday domestic misery, like all the other segments in Presence, are punctuated by a black screen—an effect that piquantly fragments the film as if it were so many shards of glass, revealing the broken, jagged tenor in much of family life.

Lucy Liu as Rebekah in Presence. Courtesy Neon. Photo: Peter Andrews. © The Spectral Spirit Company.

However flawed each member of this foursome may be, though, Chloe is the most sympathetically portrayed. She is also the most imperiled, both dismissed by her callous mother, who says of her child’s mental-health struggles, “She can’t take us down with her,” and constantly hectored by her preening brother. (Kind words from ineffectual Chris provide meager solace.) The company Tyler keeps will prove even more menacing: his swim-team buddy Ryan (West Mulholland), also drunk on his own testosterone, seduces Chloe thanks to his chilling ability to dissemble, weaponizing the language of vulnerability and sexual consent.

Callina Liang as Chloe in Presence. Courtesy Neon. Photo: Peter Andrews. © The Spectral Spirit Company.

Presence partially resulted from a planned but ultimately abandoned remake that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (who earlier collaborated on 2022’s KIMI, another claustral, disquieting tale) had wanted to do of The Uninvited, Lewis Allen’s supernatural thriller from 1944. That film, along with other ghost stories like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), is intriguingly analyzed by cinema scholar Patricia White in her 1999 book Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. White discusses these movies—all of which involve a specter or the memories of the deceased dominating a house—within the wider context of the “female gothic,” which she asserts is “a genre that as a whole is concerned with heterosexuality as a[n] institution of terror for women.” Despite my lifelong readiness to claim any film I admire as overtly or stealthily sapphic, I cannot by any stretch of the imagination make the case that Presence emits even a whiff of lavender. But, by focusing so closely on not only the injustices Chloe faces within her family but also the perils of adolescent girlhood in general, Soderbergh’s movie certainly proves its allyship with the crypto-lesbo works White examines. Presence, starkly depicting the torments Chloe must confront, can fruitfully be thought of as an exemplar of the female gothic for Gen Z.

Callina Liang as Chloe in Presence. Courtesy Neon. Photo: Peter Andrews. © The Spectral Spirit Company.

White also writes, “It is the uncanny house that the heroine is forced to inhabit—and to explore.” At that initial meeting with the realtor, Chloe is the only one in her clan who walks through the domicile, as if driven to find something, the ghost following right behind her. She is at first alarmed by the specter’s activities, gasping when she notices that the books on her bed have mysteriously been moved to her desk. (The most prominent of those volumes is You Always / You Never, a clever callback to Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk from 2020.) But she soon comes to honor and deeply respect what she can’t see. After the phantom wreaks havoc in Tyler’s room, she upbraids her brother for his insufficiently awed response: “Don’t you think maybe this is the most fascinating thing that’s ever happened to you in your stupid fucking life?” So deep is Chloe’s affinity with the spirit that she diagnoses what ails it: athazagoraphobia, the fear of being forgotten or ignored.

As the film ends, Chloe may be safe from immediate danger, but she is not necessarily saved. She is still a minor, still in the custody of two adults who may have stayed together far too long, whose union provides a bleak model. How can this bright young woman be prevented from falling into the dreariness of heteronormative life? The phantom, in its final action, may offer one solution to this persistent problem: it simply floats away, unmoored, uprooted. Exit ghost, enter freedom.

Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.

Domestic misery loves spectral company in Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller.
Follow us Facebook Twitter Instagram