A year after premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh‘s haunted house experiment “Presence” will finally hit theaters — on January 24, 2025. Neon scooped the movie out of the Park City lineup at the top of this year, now adding “Presence” to its growing roster of horror movies (and isn’t that the growing roster of any Hollywood company right now?) after “Longlegs” and “Immaculate” did strong business this year. In a most unusual twist on the haunted house movie, this film about a suburban family who discovers they are not alone in their new home is shot entirely from the perspective of the ghost. Watch the full trailer for “Presence” below.
Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the heads of a family whose marriage is already fracturing when they move into a handsome, century-old home in a good school district (with Julia Fox briefly making a cameo as their realtor). Their daughter Chloe (Callina Lang) is traumatized by her friend’s death from a fentanyl overdose, straining her relationship with her brother, Tyler (Eddie Maday). But there is potentially something more sinister afoot as the Payne family faces a spectral presence in their home — and it’s one from whose eyes this movie unfolds. Steven Soderbergh serves as cinematographer as “Presence” glides from room to room, the first-person ghost hiding in closets or trying to make contact or perhaps a warning, in a series of single takes. A jock played by West Mulholland is introduced that takes the plot in an even more malevolent direction. (Read IndieWire’s Sundance review of “Presence” here.)
“Presence” is written by David Koepp, the writer/director of the great 1999 haunted house movie “Stir of Echoes” and the less great but similarly themed “You Should Have Left” from 2020. Soderbergh’s classy production elevates the genre formula — and in a year where perspectival cinema is all the rage, including in films like “Nickel Boys” and, to a degree, “In a Violent Nature,” where the camera was ever affixed to the serial killer rather than his victims.
“Presence” opens in theaters January 24. Watch the trailer below.
