It’s never been easy to put Steven Soderbergh neatly into a box. From his extremely varied filmography to his incredible yearly culture diaries that document all the media he consumes year–by–year, Soderbergh has always been one of the most unique figures in Hollywood. With the release of Presence, his 35th(!) feature film, Soderbergh proves he’s still as vital an auteur as ever.
The most interesting aspect of Soderbergh’s long and winding career is how experimental he is as a mainstream director. The person who made the platonic ideal of a Hollywood movie in Ocean’s Eleven, a movie perfectly calibrated to both its stars and the taste of the audience at the time, is also the person who made the downright bizarre Schizopolis, a movie that stars himself without any real coherent plot or message and is bold in a way that's rare for such a prestigious director.
You can sort all of Soderbergh’s work into three broad categories. By examining those categories as different “buckets,” we can better understand Soderbergh as a director, and Presence as his most daring creation.
The first bucket, the one that contains much of Soderbergh’s best known work, is his genre films. Crime tales like Out of Sight and Haywire, sci–fi films like his remake of Solaris, or more recent horror and pulp work like Kimi and No Sudden Move, Soderbergh is, in many ways, a genre director at heart, and is not unlike some of the great journeyman auteurs of film history. Names like Howard Hawks and Sidney Lumet come to mind—directors who skillfully jump genres and work at a pace unmatched by their peers.
This genre work is almost always interesting, and Soderbergh’s unique voice shines through in all of it. It’s clear from watching any of these movies that Soderbergh grew up watching genre films. Unlike some mainstream directors, he doesn’t treat genre as any lesser than prestige dramas. You can feel his full artistic spirit in any of his films, whether it be a low–budget horror film or a knotty spy mystery.
The second bucket contains his political films, which set Soderbergh apart from most of his peers. Some examples include Traffic, which tackled the war on drugs, and his two–part biopic Che. A few more recent political films are Contagion, an eerily prescient pandemic movie, and The Laundromat, his idiosyncratic take on the Panama Papers. Soderbergh has always been interested in the corruption that permeates American society, and his critiques on the current state of the world are never rare in his filmography. I think that’s really cool. Many great directors become more distant from the real world as they become rich and successful, but Soderbergh has managed to maintain a discerning eye to the issues plaguing us for his entire 35–year career.
The third bucket is what makes Soderbergh the legend he is: his experimental films. In many ways, Soderbergh’s career can be viewed through the lens of technological and formal advancement. He was one of the first major filmmakers to attempt shooting on iPhone with Unsane and High Flying Bird. Even something like The Limey, which should be a straightforward revenge thriller, is instead a mind–bending, non–linear tone poem, more in line with French New Wave cinema than contemporary American films. Soderbergh was also one of the first adopters of digital photography in Full Frontal and has even experimented with the medium of marketing and distribution of his films, attempting to move away from more traditional TV advertising and towards using social media to promote his films.
While his peers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino settle into their elder statesman period, Soderbergh refuses to slow down. He’s released at least one movie every year since 2017 and does not look to be changing that any time soon. And if you think the quantity of films in any way affects the quality, you’d be wrong. Soderbergh has arguably gotten more consistent as he has started to make more films. This period also coincides with him getting more experimental and more willing to try something that’s never been done before.
Soderbergh is so preternaturally gifted in the art of filmmaking that these experiments are necessary to keep him interested in the craft. This is someone who, by the time he was 40, had already made Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, and Ocean’s Eleven; three perfectly constructed, mainstream Hollywood films with movie stars at their center. He has conquered the art of Hollywood storytelling. Soderbergh is also someone who edits and acts as a cinematographer on almost all of his films. He’s known to work with a small crew, shoot fast, and cut it all together quickly. In many ways, it feels like the last 20 years of his career have been a challenge to himself to make films as efficiently and strangely as possible. And, you know what? It’s working.
That brings us to Presence, Soderbergh’s latest concoction. The film is nominally a ghost story, following the Payne family as they move into a new house. Soderbergh, however, would never let anything be that simple. The film is shot from the perspective of a ghost, or a presence, haunting this house. We see the parents’ marriage begin to dissolve, the tension between the siblings rises, and the entire family collapses under the pressure of sharing the space with a supernatural entity. This is not a particularly plot–driven movie, a simple domestic tale of strife and tension, but that is certainly to the movie’s benefit. The simple structure of witnessing vignettes of domestic life allows for the craft and the forced perspective of the film, to shine.
The entire film is shot on a Sony a9, a camera you or I could buy, with a 14 mm lens and a steadicam rig. Essentially, the look of the film is wider than the human eye, allowing you to see entire rooms at once. The steadicam, which was operated by Soderbergh as he does all of his movies because he’s a cinema god, allows him to follow characters as they move throughout the house. It creates the eerie feeling that you’re watching something you shouldn’t be, and perfectly emulates the feeling of a ghost watching humans interact.
It’s an ingenious formal choice. What should be a standard ghost story takes on a sense of impending doom; a dread that feels like it permeates the entire house. The Paynes begin to break down as this ghost starts to reveal itself, leading to an explosive final act where the lines between them and the very ghost haunting them is blurred.
Presence is Soderbergh’s most successful experiment in this current phase of his career. It’s the best example of him weaving formal innovation—because I don’t think there’s ever been a film shot like this—and narrative purpose. Presence simply would not work as a film without this kind of out of the box thinking. Whereas other experiments, such as Unsane or Schizopolis, have felt half–baked, ideas that are experimental just for the sake of being experimental, Presence is both bold and fully formed. There is no Presence without the experimental nature of the production. The very idea itself only works because Soderbergh was willing to try something that hadn’t been done before.
Soderbergh has another movie coming out in a month and a half called Black Bag. Written by David Koepp, the same veteran scribe who wrote Presence and Kimi, and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, the $60 million budget of this espionage thriller represents Soderbergh’s most expensive undertaking since 2011’s Contagion. It’s exciting to see him return to something approaching blockbuster filmmaking, especially after seeing what he could do with $2 million and 11 days on Presence. Soderbergh is unique in Hollywood today in that he approaches film from both sides of the spectrum. He’s willing to produce experimental or overtly political films alongside crowd–pleasing blockbusters. No other director is doing it like him.
