Steven Soderbergh’s new feature film Presence is a ghost story for our times—an age in which ghost stories not only exercise our imaginations or advance moral perspectives but, distressingly, serve to satiate the spiritual needs of an increasingly secular population. In the film, a family of four finds itself menaced by an unseen presence in their new home, but instead of consulting a priest or pastor, they summon an amateur psychic to assess the spiritual condition of the place. The father admits that he came from a “super-religious” Catholic family, but his confession of faith is disturbingly vague. “There is mystery in the world,” he says at one point. But what does he mean by mystery? 

As it turns out, Soderbergh—the director of Traffic (2000), Erin Brockovich (2000), and other acclaimed movies—has unique qualifications to make a ghost story for our “spiritual but not religious” age. In a recent profile in the Los Angeles Times, Soderbergh—previously on record, in an interview with the BBC, as being an “optimistic atheist”—said that he does not believe in ghosts, but the article notes that he is a viewer of Celebrity Ghost Stories on A&E and that his mother was a parapsychologist. “So if you ask me ‘Well, do you believe in ghosts?’ I can only say I believe Jeff Ross was telling the truth,” Soderbergh said.  

Perhaps all would be forgiven if Presence were in any way frightening or absorbing, but thanks to its director’s unusual stylistic gambit, it is neither. Breaking with the historic cinematic convention of presenting hauntings from the perspective of the haunted—that is to say, the living people who are being beset by the ghosts—Soderbergh conscripts the perspective of the presence. Apparently in a state of karmic distress that renders it tethered to the house (a notion popularized on “ghost hunting” shows on cable), the presence roams from room to room while observing, often from an annoying distance, its new roommates, the Payne family: mom Rebekah (Lucy Liu), dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), and son Tyler (Eddy Maday).  

This might sound intriguing, but as a practical matter it’s a bit of an anticlimax. Sad to say, the idea of filming a ghost story with gliding camerawork was already sufficiently exploited forty-five years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. And Soderbergh’s aesthetic experiment defangs the film of any sense of danger. Since we function as the presence’s eyes and ears, we always know where it is about to go or what it is about to do; therefore, we never share in the shock of the living characters when they walk into a room to discover, for example, a stack of books having been moved. We’ve already seen the ghost do the moving. 

Since the film is neither memorably scary nor distinctively stylish, what are we left with? Not much. The Payne clan is one of the most annoying movie families in recent memory. As a filmmaker, Soderbergh has always been drawn to lone wolves who operate outside of society: the rootless videographer in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), the clever Cockney criminal in The Limey (1999), the hit woman in Haywire (2011), the assorted thieves and smooth operators in the Ocean’s Eleven series, and so on. On the rare occasions when Soderbergh has attended to family life, he has preferred to show families split apart: the family in 1993’s King of the Hill was torn asunder by the Depression, and the family in Traffic by their daughter’s drug addiction. Perhaps the closest Soderbergh has ever come to showing a plausibly happy family was in Erin Brockovich—and the title character, played by Julia Roberts, was herself a single, if plucky, mom.  

Soderbergh, though, is altogether too steely an artist—too cool, too hip, too glib—to be the ideal director for a movie about a family buckling under the stress of the unknown. Consequently, we never feel the slightest sympathy for any member of the Payne clan. Rebekah is, like her director, a harsh, unyielding force seen either hurriedly typing on her laptop or gushingly expressing undisguised favoritism for her son; Chris is a good-natured weakling who has the physical presence of John Fetterman and all the assertiveness of, say, Eugene Levy; Chloe is a mercurial outcast who justifies her moodiness by constant references to a pair of friends who have recently died; and Tyler—the source of all his mom’s pride and joy—is said to be a champion swimmer but shows little evidence of being anything but a standard-issue arrogant jock.  

The parents drink untold glasses of red wine; the kiddos subsist on frozen meals and takeout. Everybody seems mildly sullen even before a haunting is suspected, which seems a mite ungrateful since their new house, while one hundred years old, has been renovated in a manner befitting Martha Stewart: a farmhouse sink, granite countertops, wood floors upstairs and down, the works. The dad is the sort of guy who says to squabbling siblings, “Come on, let’s de-escalate this.” Since Presence is predicated on privileging the ghost’s view of these people—rather than their views of the ghost—the fact that this group is so unlikable is a major liability. 

The film’s impoverished conception of the supernatural becomes most evident when the presence—that is, the ghost—starts to seriously intrude upon the Paynes’ lives. The presence makes particularly quick work of terrifying Chloe: Not only are the books in her room moved from place to place but her closet shelf collapses and her ears ring with weird noises. Like the demon in the 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist, the ghost in Presence seems capable of inducing one-room earthquake-like tremors. But unlike The Exorcist, in which the mother of the demon-possessed child finally avails herself of a Catholic priest to perform the church’s rite of exorcism, the family in the Presence fumbles through their encounter with the unexplained. The amateur psychic puts in an appearance but then is turned away when she returns with further information. The parents remain clueless. As Rebekah sees it, Chloe’s experiences seem to be just another reason for her to prefer her son over her daughter. For his part, Chris is more inclined to believe Chloe, but he expresses that belief in language that suggests he is, at least partly, trying to be “supportive” or “understanding” to a child who was already troubled before the ghost showed up. “I believe you—something is with us,” he says in his usual namby-pamby manner. This sounds both like an agreement that the presence is real and an affirmation of his mixed-up daughter. Here, the paranormal becomes psychological.  

The film’s spiritual muddle extends to its conclusion, which resolves the storyline in the most earthbound manner possible. Spoiler alert: As it turns out, the ghost, or presence, is revealed to be one of Chloe’s deceased friends whose haunting has been undertaken with the aim of sparing Chloe the same fate at the hands of a bad-boy juvenile delinquent. So we are left with a puzzle: While Soderbergh (by his own account) claims he does not believe in ghosts, perhaps he does believe in them after all if their work among the living is to strike a blow against toxic masculinity—or something like that. 

Presence proves the wisdom of the line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”