When I mentioned to a couple of different friends that Steven Soderbergh directed a ghost movie currently playing in theaters, they both said, “I thought he retired.”

They haven’t been keeping up. Soderbergh has retired from filmmaking two or three times, yes — but not lately. Since his three-year hiatus ending in 2016, he’s wheeled through a few different genres: the heist comedy Logan Lucky (2017); the sports drama High Flying Bird (2019); the comedy-dramas The Laundromat (2019),  Let Them All Talk (2020), and Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023); and the thrillers Unsane (2018), No Sudden Move (2021), and Kimi (2022). He’s also got another coming out in March of this year, a darkly romantic spy film starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender called Black Bag. Busy man.

But still, a ghost movie seems like a surprising project for Soderbergh, who, when he’s not in all-out popular mode with the Ocean’s and Magic Mike franchises or crowd-pleasers like Erin Brockovich, has a slightly chilly, cerebral quality. It’s made him a favorite with critics and an unlikely director to get invested in the often-sneered-at category of the supernatural. Even more surprising is reading about Soderbergh’s own belief in ghosts, and the paranormal experience that inspired Soderbergh to make this film: