We Finally Have a Trailer for Soderbergh Ghost Story Presence

Sometimes, you just have to be patient as you wait for the first public traces of a film to emerge after a successful festival debut. That has certainly been the case for Steven Soderbergh’s ghost story Presence, a movie that premiered at Sundance way back in January, but hasn’t actually released a trailer or dropped a U.S. release date until now. Critical reviews were very strong for the cloistered chamber drama tinged with horror, and looking at the trailer below you can begin to get an idea of the visual iconoclasm present in Presence, which is of course a Soderbergh signature. As he so often has done in the past, the director has applied an entirely novel visual approach to the story, which seems to be framed almost entirely from the perspective of a floating ghost as it glides through a family’s home.

That family is the Paynes, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan as matriarch and patriarch, joined by performers Callina Liang and Eddy Maday, with an apparent highlight cameo from Julia Fox. As in so many classical haunted house stories, the family unit moves into a new home, only to learn that there’s a dark underbelly to their new abode. But is the ghostly perspective actually a source of their woes, or only a witness to them? Note that the idea of a film from a ghost’s perspective isn’t entirely novel, as we’ve seen some similar ideas in movies like A Ghost Story and the rather obviously titled I Am A Ghost in recent years.

What is really likely to end up being divisive for fans is the marketing of Soderbergh’s film, which most critics have pointed out is really more of a family drama than any form of traditional horror flick. One wonders if distributors Neon feel that hyping up the more “scary” elements and reactions to Presence is a necessity if they want to have any hope of people actually going out to theaters to see this thing. Regardless, it will ultimately hit U.S. theaters more than a year after those initial Sundance screenings, currently scheduled for release on Jan. 24, 2025. In the meantime, you can check out the trailer below and Paste‘s review from Sundance here.