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:

We had a house sitter, and she described seeing someone at the end of the hallway crossing from the bathroom to the bedroom while she was watching TV in this sort of parlor area. And she immediately called out without thinking, “Jules!” [Soderbergh’s wife, Jules Asner] and then realized, “Jules isn’t here. That’s why I’m house sitting. . . .” What we discovered was someone had died in our house, and there were questions about the circumstances of this person’s death, and some of our neighbors speculated that, even though the police had ruled it a suicide, that it was not a suicide. And so our theory became that it was that woman that our friend saw at the end of the hallway, which lined up with the age of the person who had died in the house.

This incident led Soderbergh to wonder “what it would be like to be this spectral figure.” He generated a few pages of plot based on thinking through this question, featuring a ghostly presence watching a new family moving into its home. Then he brought in renowned screenwriter David Koepp (Black Bag, Kimi, Spider-Man, Mission: Impossible, Carlito’s Way, Jurassic Park), his favorite collaborator in recent years, to generate a script.

Given Soderbergh’s filmography as well as that personal experience with the paranormal as a starting point, it makes sense that Presence is a ghost movie that departs significantly from what we expect of the horror subgenre. It operates instead as a creepy family drama witnessed by a supernatural spectator who’s trying to protect the daughter of the family from the dreadful forces that seem to be gathering momentum around her.

The oddity of this premise virtually requires an unusual approach, and Soderbergh — who operates his own camera and does his own editing, using pseudonyms in the credits — loves formal experimentation. This film is an experiment in sustaining long takes, one per scene, using wide-angle lenses and first-person point-of-view camerawork throughout. The subjective experience we’re locked into is that of the ghost’s.

First-person narrative films are fascinating but also frustrating, as you know if you’ve sat through any. Early experiments include such noir films as Orson Welles’s intended first-person POV adaptation of Heart of Darkness, before he gave up the struggle at the script stage and made Citizen Kane (1941) instead. Lady in the Lake (1947) and Dark Passage (1947) followed. The latter is more successful because only the first third of the film is in first-person POV. Once the main character, an escaped convict, has back-alley plastic surgery and looks like Humphrey Bogart, the camera can resume its customary functions, and it feels to the viewer as if one’s head has been removed from a vise.

As Soderbergh himself pointed out in a discussion of virtual reality (VR) narratives, the lack of the shot/countershot approach that’s central to narrative cinema tends to paralyze viewers’ emotional response:

That there’s no POV and reverse angle on a character who’s experiencing this is hugely limiting. That is how we engage with visual stories, is to watch the expressions of the characters so that we can read the emotions of what we’re experiencing.

But Soderbergh has found a way, through the fluid use of long takes and reliance on studying the facial expressions and reactions of living characters from the ghost’s vantage point. We begin the film floating through the bare, empty rooms and hallways of a big, newly renovated suburban house as an affluent but troubled family movies into it. The family members are big, burly, emotionally available father Chris (Chris Sullivan), uptight, career-driven mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu), self-centered overachieving older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday), and suffering younger sister Chloe (Callina Liang). Grieving the death of her best friend, Nicole, who recently overdosed, Chloe is the only family member who can sense the presence of the ghost, which attaches itself to her early on.

The film is engrossing, given the ghost’s strange voyeuristic vantage point on the ugly crosscurrents in the family. Each family member is shown pouring hard liquor to deal with the building tensions. Rebecca is involved in some nefarious professional doings that Chris is secretly consulting a lawyer about, wondering if a legal separation might prevent the whole family from sharing in the fallout of possible criminal charges. Rebecca drunkenly confesses to her son that no matter what she’s done, it’s all been for him. She dotes on Tyler so excessively, her husband reminds her with rising ire, “We have two children. Two children.”

The odd one out in the family is Chloe, whose traumas have compounded to the point that Tyler warns her she isn’t going to drag him down at this new location like she did in the old one. She’s not only mourning her friend’s death, she knew another teenage girl who died in similar mysterious circumstances, giving rise to the rumor of a killer on the loose in their old school district. She takes refuge in her room, which happens to be where the ghost “lives,” retreating to her closet in taking breaks from watching the family’s increasingly nasty interactions. When this happens, the camera cuts to black, indicating by the length of the shot a short break or a long interval of time.

The main outsider interacting with the family is Ryan (West Mulholland), a popular blonde teenager from school who has befriended Tyler and starts a romantic relationship with Chloe on the sly. And as the paranormal presence makes itself more undeniable, moving objects and then throwing things in fits of apparent rage, a psychic medium named Lisa (Natalie Woodlams-Torres) is called in by Chris, over the objections of Rebecca and Tyler, to communicate with the spirit. Lisa tells the family that the presence is there on a mission and can’t leave till it’s completed. And later she warns Chris that something terrible is going to happen.

The ending of the film wraps up several mysteries that have been built up in rather shocking and confusing fashion. I found it unsatisfying. Then again, I find explanations in films of the supernatural invariably weaken them. But the final effect is an interesting one, taking us outside of the house in a way that’s such a relief, it makes the viewer suddenly conscious of having been trapped in one location for the whole movie. Soderbergh’s clever, fluid use of the camera in the limited space has made us less aware of the film’s tightly restricted setup. It’s a low-budget film shot in an incredibly short time, only three weeks, and it has a wonderfully short running time of eighty-five minutes.

For some people, the film’s limited scope will be a deal-breaker. Too entrapping. But as for me, I like ghost movies, I like formal experiments in film, I like the always-fierce Lucy Liu, and sometimes I like Soderbergh films, with The Limey (1999) and The Informant! (2009) as my two favorites. So it figures that I was a rapt viewer of Presence.

I wish Soderbergh would do more experiments in the horror film genre, which is still absurdly dismissed by many film critics and people who give out awards. It’s good for those people to feel torn between auteur-worship and genre-shaming.