Steven Soderbergh shot Presence in 11 days in September 2023, in a house in Cranford, New Jersey, and he did the camerawork himself. He wore nylon and rubber slippers so his footsteps would not be heard.
The film is a ghost story told from the ghost’s point of view. “It might be the simplest idea I’ve ever had,” Soderbergh said. “The camera’s the ghost.” Neon released it in U.S. theaters on January 24, 2025, after it premiered at Sundance on January 19, 2024.
The story
David Koepp wrote the script. A family, Rebekah and Chris Payne and their teenage children Tyler and Chloe, moves into a new house and finds something unseen already living there. Chloe, still grieving the death of a friend, senses it first. Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland and Julia Fox star.
How it was made
The idea came from Soderbergh, who has said he and his wife believed a presence they called “Mimi” shared their own house. “Is Mimi pissed at us living here?” he asked. He remains personally skeptical about ghosts, even though his mother was a parapsychologist.
He wrote 10 pages and handed them to Koepp, who built out the plot and added the final twist. The project was not announced until December 2023, when it turned up on the Sundance lineup. Filming used an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement from the 2023 strike. Soderbergh worked under his pseudonym Peter Andrews, with a Sony mirrorless camera on a DJI Ronin stabilizer, and called the long takes “mini plays.” Climbing stairs while watching his feet ruined several of them. Neon bought distribution rights for $5 million.
Box office and reviews
The film opened to $3.3 million in the United States and Canada, sixth place for the weekend, and has grossed $10.8 million worldwide against a $2 million budget. It earned a C+ from CinemaScore.
Critics were mostly positive. Rotten Tomatoes lists 88 percent of 252 reviews as favorable, and Metacritic gives it 77 out of 100. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called it “a nail-biting ghost story.” Bilge Ebiri of New York Magazine wrote that it “might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages.”
Not everyone agreed. David Sims of The Atlantic called it “less an entrée than a charming apéritif,” and Rex Reed of the New York Observer dismissed it as “lifeless” and “cliché-ridden.”
