PRESENCE

and Steven Soderbergh's descent into the disposable

After a brief retirement from an industry where he felt out of place, Steven Soderbergh came back with Logan Lucky, Unsane, and Mosaic from 2017 to 2018, which was the best three-project run he’d made in the 21st century. Each of these films, despite their mainstream genre trappings, hinted toward a filmmaker on the outside looking in, pushing boundaries on his own terms. Logan Lucky was the first to be released by his own distribution company, Fingerprint Releasing, founded in an attempt to get independent films out there to mass audiences without the help of the big studios by which he’d been alienated. Unsane was the first of his iPhone-shot period, suggesting psychological horror through the flattened, sterile image of the mobile camera that has defined the aesthetic of social media and handmade moving-image art over the last decade. Mosaic was an interactive app disguised as a miniseries, with the viewer not only in control of the order of plot points, but equipped with the ability to go deeper into the story with access to in-universe news bulletins as pdf files they could download. He followed that trio with a fun if less rewarding basketball film, High Flying Bird, that followed André Holland’s attempts to create a second world of hoops outside of a locked out NBA — a stand-in for the filmmaker’s own place in the industry. None of these films had particularly great screenplays, but all of the other elements of filmmaking that Soderbergh had seemingly perfected were so strong that I was wowed nonetheless. After that, things got a bit muddy.

The Laundromat was a thuddingly obvious sub-McKay film about the Panama papers, made for Netflix, and boasting a cast of real movie stars: Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, and Gary Oldman. He even took the direct address style of The Big Short and multiplied its obnoxiousness. The Streep duology continued with diminishing returns in Let Them All Talk, a cruise ship-set series of lengthy dialogue scenes gesturing toward something literary (see: subject matter) or even Rohmerian (“well-dressed” affluent vacationers discovering things about themselves through long conversations), but was largely a snooze. Despite my initial disgust with The Laundromat’s tastelessness, the fact that I can’t recall a single specific exchange of dialogue from Let Them All Talk may be even more damning than out-of-context screenshots of Streep’s brownface in the former. Both of these films were undeniably stylish, but the actual meat of the film was so poorly dramatized that I (an avowed formalist) found myself extremely unmoved despite the Cool Shot Factor.

For No Sudden Move, Soderbergh returned to the neo-noir realm that made him such a favorite among cinephiles (Out of Sight and The Limey are still fantastic), and even busted out some fifty year-old heavy-duty anamorphic lenses for the occasion. Unfortunately, the potboiler script devolves into a third act Economy of Twists that renders everything fairly pointless. On the positive side of things, Brendan Fraser was the human embodiment of a bowling ball, and Soderbergh seemed to be chuckling from behind the camera at the exaggerated way he framed the former star’s figure. Ultimately, it was in one eye and out the other, and along with the eventual release of Kimi, solidified my problem with Steven Soderbergh’s current streak of prolific filmmaking: it’s utterly disposable. While other highly prolific filmmakers like Hong Sang-soo, Johnnie To, or Woody Allen seem to treat each project like a piece of the larger puzzle, Soderbergh’s output has grown scattershot and strangely anonymous despite his visual signature on every frame of every film. The form (often quirky and sometimes mind-blowing) and content (getting more boring by the year) are drifting further and further apart, rather than reinforcing one another.

The job of a true genre auteur is to take the junkiest, silliest, even disposable crime or horror scripts and make great art out of them, like so many great directors of the classic Hollywood system did, and so few are able to do today. My two guiding lights in this regard are two very disparate names: Edgar G. Ulmer and David Fincher. Ulmer made exactly one large studio picture, his masterpiece, The Black Cat, before being ousted from Hollywood and forced into the ghetto of the poverty row studios. He smuggled artistry into shoestring budget productions made to be shown on the b-side of a double feature in films like Detour and The Naked Dawn. Fincher, on the other hand, has pretty much always been in good standing with the studios. His films like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl elevate trashy material (try to watch the original Swedish Dragon Tattoo movie, it’s awful) into films that were so cleanly polished and masterfully rendered through an emphasized digital artificiality, that a decade and a half later, nobody in Hollywood has caught up with them. The difference between these two is that Ulmer made films every year to stay alive, while Fincher had (and continues to have) the luxury of gestating for years between projects.

Steven Soderbergh at his best bridges the gap between these two filmmakers; his insistence on pushing forward with film technology rendered many of his early digital projects visually similar to Fincher, and his triple duty of cinematographer and editor also suggest the image of an artist in control of every single frame of their films. He also, like Ulmer, worked in a myriad of genres and tonal registers, even if it was by choice rather than force. Unfortunately, the last few Soderbergh projects that I’ve seen have felt like the worst of both worlds, rather than the best. His meticulous and efficient workflow is surely worth bragging about (like how he cut High Flying Bird while shooting The Laundromat, or how he edited Presence as he was shooting it, and had the first cut ready thirty minutes after the last day of shooting), but on lower and lower budgets, the production value looks more like the roughshod b-pictures of Ulmer than the pristine digital packages of Fincher, and I can’t help but think that his insistence on the hand-made is crippling him.

Working as your own DP (and camera operator!) and editor is commendable, but one must consider what he’s sacrificing, and why other filmmakers don’t take this approach. Surely, his contemporaries aren’t just lazy. Maybe, and this might be crazy, other filmmakers take more time to focus on the direction of actors, tweaking the script before shooting, and rewriting in the edit, to create the best possible version of their project. Soderbergh’s preference for quantity over quality has led me to skip his last few projects, a Magic Mike threequel and a pair of miniseries, but I was intrigued enough by the trailer of the NEON-distributed Presence to take a trip to my local multiplex.

A ghost story in which the spirit embodies the (Soderbergh-operated) camera is the kind of project that would have had me sprinting to the multiplex in 2019, but this is 2025, and it took me nearly a week to roll out. Unfortunately, the script by David Koepp (the middle of the duo’s trilogy, with Kimi in the rearview and Black Bag coming soon) is out-of-touch despite its attempts at modernity, and as a great auteur once said, such small portions! A trim 85 minutes including credits, the film never actually finds its drama or claustrophobia, due in equal parts to the over-involved camera and the thin script. While I was ready for a spiritual sequel to Here, Zemeckis’ horror movie about a house that kills people, I was instead met with four words that no horror fan has wanted to hear since 2018: A Film About Grief. Following the loss of her best friend, high schooler Chloe is moved to a new house for a fresh start by her parents and alongside her brother. However, the house contains… a Presence. To show that the family is of the present moment, Koepp reverses the roles; Chris Sullivan’s Girldad is the support system for his daughter, and the true believer of the mystical. Lucy Liu’s character is laughably one-sided, focused solely on her son’s swimming career while her daughter is in crisis. The siblings bicker, the marriage is strained, and eventually the Fentanyl man shows up to play the horror villain.

Soderbergh’s insistence on shooting this in long-takes a-la Rope while embodying the spirit as camera operator hinders a film that already started at a disadvantage due to its groan-worthy and obvious script full of shortcuts toward characterization and ridiculous attempts at contemporary dialogue. The climax of the film, involving the aforementioned Fent Man, is as laughable as any scenario in the contemporary horror landscape, and goes on for what feels longer than the entire 85 minute runtime. The ghost is limited to the mobility of Soderbergh himself in the camera rig, and the long-take style doesn’t allow for anything even veering into the surreal, which is a problem in a film about a haunted house. Walking back to my car, I was a little higher on the film than I am now just a few hours later, which confirms my worst fear about Presence, it’s yet another late-period Soderbergh film that goes in one eye and out the other. Steven, If you’re reading this, and I know you’re not, please take more time between Black Bag and whatever you decide to do next. You need time to think about the script. Maybe let it sit in post-production for an extra few weeks. Soderbergh famously offered Paul Schrader to recut The Canyons after seeing the potential in an advanced screening of the largely hated film, and maybe he should let someone else take a look at the next one after he cuts together his version. I’ve ghosted a few of his projects in recent years, but having finally seen the man who I’ve given so much time to over the years on the big screen again, I’m ready to call it quits. After forty films, I’m breaking up with Steven Soderbergh, unless he can prove to me that he’s changed.