A family move into a new home and begin to suspect that there is a supernatural “presence” also in the house.

So, what next? Charge it rent?

Don’t be silly, it’s not a comedy.

“Presence” is a new supernatural thriller from “retired” (quotation marks used for sarcasm) director Steven Soderbergh.

Look, to be honest, this reaffirms that old saying of – ‘there’s no new stories, just different ways to tell them.’ And this is one of those.

Told from the perspective of the entity itself, this is not too dissimilar to last years “In A Violent Nature,” where we see a traditional horror, this time a ghost story, from a different viewpoint.

Tech-wise, as a fellow filmmaker/video producer I went into a tech nerd-spin with how they shot this. Shot with a Sony A9 III, because of its global shutter meaning in basic terms: it captures all of the pixels at once and you don’t have that bendy-wendy-wobbly look (yes, that term is absolutely a tech term, in fact it’s trademarked to me) when you whip the camera around like most digital cameras that have a rolling shutter.

So, Soderbergh (using the pseudonym Peter Andrews as Director of Photography) essentially chucked the Sony camera on a gimbal with a 14mm Sony G Master lens and wandered around the house capturing the action. Lighting-wise, this was all done via available/practical lights. The cast have stated in interviews that the bulbs in the lamps/house lights were a lot brighter than normal bulbs, which makes me suspect that he used the Aputure Accent B7C practical bulbs so he could adjust brightness/temp/colour.

But all that tech jargon aside, what makes this super-interesting is Soderbergh once again strips back the budget constraints of feature filmmaking, buying the camera/lights/gimbal/lens would’ve come in at less than $30k. And just as he did with “Unsane,” where he shot it all on an iPhone, Soderbergh shows modern filmmakers that story is key.

Now does the story stand up?

Meh, kinda.

I really enjoyed it and not just for the tech-nerd stuff. Story wise, it’s a fairly standard ghost story. But it’s told well.

Would I pay to see it at the cinema?

Probably not. This definitely reminds me of those “Hammer House of Horror”/”Tales From The Unexpected” type TV films.

So maybe save your pennies and wait for it to hit the streaming services.

It is very enjoyable though and I recommend it.

I can absolutely see it making my top ten horrors of 2025.

• Myles Davies