Presence (2025) [Movie Review]

When the trailer for Skinamarink first dropped a couple of years ago, I watched it many, many times. I analyzed it frame by frame, trying to make sense of the images and the unique anticipation that I was feeling. An unintended consequence of my obsession was that the refrain that echoed throughout the trailer, “In this house…”, has permanently embedded itself in my mind in William Peter Blatty’s droning voice (because the phrase itself was lifted from the original banned trailer for The Exorcist). So now, when I see the trailer and poster for Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, which declares, “In this house, there is a presence,” my mind immediately flashes back to that deeply disturbing Skinamarink trailer.

The comparison isn’t entirely unwarranted—both films do feature a presence in their respective houses, and both are, at their hearts, family dramas, and both have torn audiences and critics alike. Presence might suffer from the kind of marketing misdirection that left audiences expecting a much different film, but the campaign seems to have been effective, having more than tripled its $2 million production budget in its short run. 

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Presence follows the Payne family as they settle into their new suburban home, and almost immediately, cracks begin to show in the family dynamics. Rebekah Payne (Lucy Liu) is a career-driven mother of two, though she makes her favoritism toward her athletic son Tyler (Eddy Maday) exceedingly clear. Her husband Chris (played by Chris Sullivan) is increasingly frustrated with Rebekah’s dismissal of their daughter Chloe’s (Callina Liang) depression, particularly because Rebekah seems unsympathetic toward the recent death of Chloe’s best friend Nadia, whose passing was a suspected overdose. When Chloe senses the presence in her bedroom, Rebekah and Tyler dismiss her as attention-seeking and disruptive, but soon enough, they all witness the poltergeist-like activities firsthand.

The thing that has divided audiences is that this haunted house film is much less like Poltergeist (1982) than it is like David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017). In both films, the ghost is more an observer than it is a terrifier, and although both presences can and do interact with their corporeal housemates, it seems to be with a great deal of effort and with a relatively small impact. One meaningful difference between the two is the treatment of the identity of the haunting: In A Ghost Story, we know from the start that Casey Affleck’s character is the soul hidden underneath the sheet, but in the first-person perspective Presence, the audience can only speculate until the very end who or what is behind the camera.

Image courtesy of IMDb.

So too do both films play with the idea of temporality from the ghost’s point of view. In A Ghost Story, Affleck’s ghost learns the downside of immortality as his old life passes him by and eons stretch on as his soul stays locked to what used to be his home. In Presence, Lisa (Natalie Woolams-Torres), a clairvoyant hired by the Payne family to diagnose their house, tells them that the spirit doesn’t operate in the same timeline as we do—instead experiencing both past and present simultaneously, a state of being that can be just as confusing for the ghost as it would be for any of us. She goes on to say that the presence may not even remember who it is or why it’s there, which throws a wrench in Chloe’s insistence that it’s there to help, and that it may even be Nadia’s spirit sent to comfort her. 

Critics so far have praised Presence’s unique spin. Keeping viewers pinned to the ghost’s point of view gives us an insight that few ghost stories allow us. The ghost, despite never speaking and ostensibly not having a clear memory of its identity or its purpose, has a remarkably charming personality. The protectiveness it shows over Chloe and the hints it gives her to prove its existence are sweet, and the feeling of safety it seems to get from hiding in the half-closed closet is, frankly, adorable. A refreshing perspective alone, however, does not make a film work, and the Payne family drama that fills the house can, at times, be a little thin.

The battle lines between “Team Tyler” and “Team Chloe” are so stark, so overt, that it’s difficult to believe that Chris has stayed in his marriage as long as he has. There’s no nuance to Rebekah’s favoritism—down to her late-night drunken admission to Tyler that “everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.” What might have been saved for a Freudian slip or the voicing of a personal revelation, a potential turning point for a conflicted Rebekah or a guilty Tyler, is instead superfluous to the characters. There’s nothing revealed in the scene other than to make diegetically explicit what had only been implicit.

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Tyler’s disdain for his sister, too, feels unambiguous. In every family conversation, particularly before the presence makes itself known, Tyler does everything from accusing Chloe of being on drugs, of crying for attention, to sabotaging his popularity in a new school—none of which are particularly outlandish on their own, but are presented with zeal. The siblings never have a moment of compassion, no lighthearted ribbing or mutual call to arms. They never show the “sibling” angle to their rivalry, which makes it all the more baffling when Tyler brings his new friend Ryan home and, pausing as they pass Chloe’s bedroom door, asks, “Do you want to say hi?” In what universe does an older teenage brother, with a clear chip on his shoulder, willingly go out of his way to initiate an introduction between a friend and his younger sister? 

Because of the ferocity of Tyler’s interactions with Chloe, his eventual “come to Jesus” moment feels unearned. His redemption is less of an arc, and more a redemption cliff, coming without even a hint of personal clarity. Several of the characters have unsatisfying development journeys that, without Soderbergh’s expert hand in the director’s chair and clean cinematography, might have found a better home in a daytime melodrama rather than in a supernatural thriller. Filming from the perspective of the ghost, while unique, didn’t bring the same newness to the genre that a film like last year’s In a Violent Nature brought to the slasher genre. That film, along with the much-talked-about grotesque practical violence, made several interesting observations about storytelling by tying viewers to the killer. In Presence, those observations seem to be more superficial than substantive. 

Despite those misgivings, I can’t deny that Presence has kept me thinking about it. It’s a great opportunity to inject some life into the ghost/haunted house genre. It’s a worthy experiment in bending genre to accommodate different kinds of narratives, but when all is said and done, I felt that the innovations that Presence builds upon were done better by other filmmakers first. 

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Article by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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