Steven Soderbergh's Presence is an experimental horror film filmed from a ghost's point of view.
The unseen vantage forces the audience into the role of a voyeur.
Rather than chasing scares, the film lingers on family loneliness and the breaks inside a household.
“An invisible presence watches us”
Overview: how it begins and how it is built
New house. Strange distance.
The year 2024 situates the film in a recent context and recalls conversations about genre and expectation at the time.
From the opening shots the camera does not act like a human eye. Instead, it scans the home as if it were the gaze of something else.
Therefore, the usual route of identifying with a frightened character is deliberately blocked early on.
Meanwhile, viewers are repositioned as observers and, crucially, as voyeurs, and that position persists to the final frame.
Filming technique: turning viewpoint inside out
The camera becomes the subject.
This choice is the film's chief innovation.
Normally, viewers follow events through a character's eyes and thus feel that character's fear.
However, aligning the audience with an unknown presence creates both moral distance and a sense of unease.
As a result, viewers are less passive recipients of jump scares and more complicit observers—they become the ones who 'watch' someone.
Plot: the family's shadow
Moving and fracture coexist.
The Payne family appears to have material stability when they move into the new house.
On the surface, they have a home and the trappings of security.
On the other hand, inside the house relationships are cracked, pain is present, and each person carries loss in different ways.
The daughter, Chloe, is grieving the overdose death of a close friend and lives with trauma; the couple has unresolved fractures from their past; and the son, Tyler, amplifies household tension with self-centered pride.
Those tensions soon collide with the unknown presence.
The twist: a moment that reinterprets
The identity refuses easy prediction.
After the midpoint, the film gradually hints at the origin of the presence, and that origin departs from the archetypal horror template.
Crucially, the film does not rely on giving the presence a neat personal story. Rather, it centers how that presence affects the family.
Consequently, viewers must reassess the framework of fear they brought into the screening, and that reassessment often comes with emotional shock and guilt.
Positive readings: innovation and feeling
A new grammar of dread.
First, foregrounding the camera's viewpoint refreshes familiar genre conventions.
Second, the twist raises the story's stakes and asks viewers to reconstruct their emotions rather than simply react to a scare.
Third, the film prefers a fine-grained study of loneliness and rupture over mechanical horror devices.
In that sense, the intimate conflicts inside a home prompt viewers to reflect on their own social ties.
Negative readings: clichés and logic
Questions remain.
First, tales about ghosts and old houses are highly circulated material, and that familiarity can blunt the film's freshness.
Second, critics point to gaps in narrative logic: the presence's motives and actions may not convincingly persuade every viewer.
On the other hand, some audience members read the film as an emotional experience and accept those gaps as deliberate artistic choices.
Debate: voices in favor
Supporters defend the experiment.
From this perspective, the film is not mere genre fare.
Instead, it is a family drama wearing a horror skin and a narrative experiment that asks ontological questions about being and attention.
Soderbergh's camera choice intentionally creates discomfort, but that discomfort is also the ethical question running through the film.
Moreover, the twist is not a trick for its own sake; it reorganizes characters' relationships and forces viewers to re-evaluate every prior scene.
Thus, supporters place high value on the film's psychological depth and aesthetic risk.
Debate: voices against
The story is not always hospitable.
Critics argue that the ghost-and-old-house setup is clichéd and risks failing to generate new meaning.
They also say the emotional shock delivered by the twist sometimes lacks sufficient inner life to persuade; characters' inner arcs are not always fully realized.
Furthermore, the bleak ending leaves unresolved questions, which for some viewers produces dissatisfaction rather than insight.
Ultimately, opponents feel the film's formal daring does not fully compensate for shortcomings in emotional closure and narrative generosity.
Value judgment: gains and costs
Experimentation has a price.
On the gain side, the film expands the genre's limits and confirms the director's appetite for formal play—Soderbergh is known for alternating between mainstream and experimental work (he directed Traffic and Ocean's Eleven).
That choice secures critical attention and a place in film conversation.
On the loss side, viewers who came for conventional scares may feel alienated, and that gap can affect word-of-mouth and box-office results.
Therefore, the film reads like a calculated trade-off between artful risk and popular friendliness.
Social and cultural angle: the private and the public
The home is a small map of society.
Family conflict can scale into social concern: lack of caregiving, absent mental health support, and weak safety nets show up indirectly.
Thus the private traumas depicted on screen link to questions about education, welfare, and health systems.
In that way, the film uses the intimate space of the home to open broader social conversation.
Genre expectations and audience experience
It asks what we mean by horror.
Marketing sells Presence as a horror film, but the felt experience is often closer to pity and empathy than to dread.
As a result, reactions split: some embrace the experiment, while others feel deceived.
In the end, the film attempts to redefine the genre by borrowing horror's surface to examine relational absence.
Conclusion and recommendation
The key word is reinterpretation.
In short, Presence translates horror grammar into a formal experiment about being and attention.
Therefore, some viewers will find deep feeling and new questions, while others will meet an unfriendly narrative.
Either way, the film delivers very different experiences depending on what the viewer expects. That is both its purpose and its risk.
So ask yourself: are you ready to look at 'presence' instead of looking for a scare?
