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

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh takes us there in “ Presence ,” a ghost story filmed entirely in a New Jersey home. Unlike most films in the genre, the movie, in theaters Friday (Jan. 24), is told solely from the point of view of the ghost.

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's "Presence" is an unconventional haunted house story told from the perspective of the ghost -- and we've got the details.

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

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

“Presence” is a beautifully executed vision of a rather mediocre script. What makes it interesting is the POV “gimmick,” which Soderbergh demonstrates as a legitimate mode of cinematic storytelling. His camera movements take on such a human quality that we become emotionally connected to it as another character in the story.

The camera is the ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s chillingly effective, experiential haunted house drama “Presence.” The filmmaker traps the audience in a beautiful suburban home, letting us drift through rooms with this curious being, in and out of delicate conversations as we (and the ghost) try to piece together a puzzle blindly.

Over Zoom I spoke to Koepp about writing within the confines of the film’s single point-of-view, the value of what’s left out of a story, dreams and screenwriting, and his thoughts on the business of screenwriting today. Presence opens January 24, 2025 from NEON.