1.0Ms. Magazinehttps://msmagazine.comSoderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Isn’t a Horror Movie—It’s a Ghost Story About Grief, Love, Redemption and Family - Ms. Magazinerich600338<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="YwDNy9z8mu"><a href="https://msmagazine.com/2025/09/06/presence-film-movie-review/">Soderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Isn’t a Horror Movie—It’s a Ghost Story About Grief, Love, Redemption and Family</a></blockquote><iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://msmagazine.com/2025/09/06/presence-film-movie-review/embed/#?secret=YwDNy9z8mu" width="600" height="338" title="“Soderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Isn’t a Horror Movie—It’s a Ghost Story About Grief, Love, Redemption and Family” — Ms. Magazine" data-secret="YwDNy9z8mu" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" class="wp-embedded-content"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
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https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Presence-Still1-H-2024.webp1296730That trailer set me up for a straight-up horror film. What I got instead was something far more unsettling—and, ultimately, more rewarding. Presence isn’t built on cheap scares or cathartic screams. It’s a slow, intimate drift through grief and perspective, a ghost story told entirely from the other side. By committing fully to realism, Soderbergh dismantles horror’s most familiar conventions and archetypes, leaving us with something haunting in an entirely different way. We aren’t watching the ghost terrorize a family—we are the ghost. We float through their arguments, their secrets, their loneliness, until the banality of eternity itself begins to sink in. The result is one of the most quietly devastating haunted-house films in recent memory: a meditation on loss, dread and the slow realization that the scariest thing of all isn’t a jump scare, but grief itself.