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Releasing on Jan 17, 2025
- 2025
- R
- Neon
- 1 h 25 m
- 2025
- R
- Neon
- 1 h 25 m
Summary A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone.
Directed By: Steven Soderbergh
Written By: David Koepp
- 2025
- R
- Neon
- 1 h 25 m
- 2025
- R
- Neon
- 1 h 25 m
Presence
78
User Score
User reviews are not available yet
tbd
Summary A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone.
Directed By: Steven Soderbergh
Written By: David Koepp
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
78
80% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
20% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 20 Critic Reviews
78
80% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
20% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
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.
When Presence delves into the more typical trappings of the genre — everything from a scene where a psychic investigates the house to moments of seance-like invocation — it still retains its unique voice, thanks not just to Soderbergh but Koepp.
Penned by David Koepp, who previously wrote Soderbergh’s tight and thrilling chamber piece Kimi, Presence is a darkly comic and slow-burn genre film that presents as both a haunted house tale and an exploration of a strained family dynamic—shown entirely through the perspective of its ghost.
By Jamie Arena
FULL REVIEW
Without relying on cheap jump scares, Soderbergh’s psychological horror thriller is a shattering mystery about instinct that will chill you.
Told from the perspective of a “presence” in a house, Soderbergh explores this type of horror story in a way that only he can, playing with the structure of similar films, screwing with our expectations for this type of film, and once more, testing himself while showing the untapped potential in the genre.
Soderbergh operating at a lower level is still higher than many of his peers. Presence just never fully comes together in the way we hope, a ghost story haunted more by the possibility of what it could have been.
Presence is a brisk 85 minutes, which is nice if you have dinner plans, but it also exposes limited storytelling ambitions. It’s a mid-season episode of TV. We don’t get to know much about the characters, and don’t care either way about their fate.
User Reviews
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