PRESENCE Trailer: A Family Is Haunted in Steven Soderbergh’s Experimental Nightmare

After terrifying audiences at this year’s Sundance and TIFF, Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house experiment Presence will finally make its way to U.S. theaters to kick off the new year. NEON picked up the movie following its Sundance premiere, adding it to its ever-growing roster of horror movies (which includes their highest-grossing film to date, Longlegs). Soderbergh once again serves as his own cinematographer (under the alias Peter Andrews). Only this time, the camera is a character itself as the film is shot entirely from the perspective of a ghost.

The film stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, and Eddy Maray as a fractured family moving into a century-old home in the suburbs (Julia Fox makes an appearance as their realtor). They soon realize they may not be alone as they face a spectral entity in their home that wants something from them. David Koepp (writer of Jurassic Park, Panic Room, etc) penned the script which grew from an idea Soderbergh had based on a rumored gruesome history of a house he lived in.

In her review from Sundance, Melanie Addington wrote “The story is a familiar haunted house, teen girl story but stands out with the cinematography by Soderbergh and bone-chilling score by Zack Ryan… The performances are strong throughout with a special note of Callina Liang, the lead of the film as she stays in the room that the Presence tends to treat as a home base… The film keeps the tension with the unnerving use of the camera as people almost catch the eye, feeling the presence, putting us as the viewer into the role of voyeur with the stress of getting caught. Often as we watch a movie we observe neutrally what is happening up on the screen, but are rarely brought into the action so concretely. But few jump scares ever happen as we are so present in the action that slowly rolls out until a sudden climax that wraps together the whole story in almost too neat a bundle. The film reminds us how trivialities get us nowhere and that life is so short and so quick to disappear at a moment’s notice without ever banging our heads against the wall to learn it.”

Presence opens in theaters January 24. Check out the trailer and posters below.

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