The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.”

Horror fans feasted well in 2024 with the year capped off by the release of Nosferatu (even if UK viewers had to wait until New Year's Day), and we haven't had to wait too long for the first stand-out horror of 2025.

Doing his own camerawork, the director gleefully enriches the haunted-house genre with a simple but ingenious device.

The intimate supernatural drama stars Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan as homeowners with an unexpected houseguest. With Presence, Steven Soderbergh Resurrects the Ghost Story: Review

I need to be scared of something,” Steven Soderbergh tells me as we sit down to discuss his new film, Presence. “Every movie that I have worked on, there’s gotta be a pocket of fear about some aspect of it.

Steven Soderbergh isn’t just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He’s also, in a way, its central character. “Presence” is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost inside a home a family has just moved into.

The prolific filmmaker turns a supernatural thriller into an experiment in first-person perspective and a dysfunctional family drama that’d make Eugene O’Neill cringe

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh's chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.”

They’re selling “Presence” as a horror movie when it’s something else entirely: a ghost story as told from the point of view of the ghost. As such, it’s more unsettling than scary, more dramatically gripping than nerve-shredding. And it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, so you know it has to be smart.

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.”

Lucy Liu stars in the director’s clever haunted-house mystery that adopts the perspective of the specter.