Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Presence
2025 · Steven Soderbergh · Presence on Sightlines
The camera backs into a closet and waits there. Through the open door we can see a bedroom in a house that was renovated to sell, with nothing personal on the walls yet. A teenage girl crosses the room. She doesn't look over. Then, some scenes later, she does. Chloe, the daughter of the family who has just moved in, has felt something, and she turns toward the spot where we are.
That turn is the heart of Presence. Steven Soderbergh shot the whole film from the point of view of whatever is already living in the house. Every scene is one unbroken shot, made with a small digital camera on a wide lens and a stabilizing rig, and Soderbergh operated it himself under his old cinematographer pseudonym, Peter Andrews. The camera floats at about the height of a person. It leans in when it is curious. It pulls back or rushes when it is upset. When it wants to brood it goes back to the closet. The family walk past it, and sometimes straight through it. Soderbergh isn't only filming the ghost. In a real sense he is playing it.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a useful way to see what that does. He thought a camera movement is never just a view of things that move. It also expresses a change in the whole situation. He called this the shot as a mobile section. In most films the whole that changes is the drama. In Presence it is a mood. When the camera drifts closer to Chloe, you aren't seeing an angle. You are watching something come to care about her.
Deleuze took a deeper idea from the philosopher Henri Bergson. A living being is a kind of gap, an interval between what reaches it and what it does in return. To perceive is to hold action back for a moment. Most movie heroes close that gap quickly: they see the problem and they act. The presence is nearly all gap. It sees everything and hears everything, and it can barely touch anything. A shelf gets disturbed and a stack of things falls over. Those are about all it can manage, and nobody can read them. They frighten the family instead of telling them anything. Deleuze calls this living hesitation a center of indetermination, and it explains why Presence feels sad instead of scary. The ghost isn't hunting the family. It is stuck between seeing and doing.
The film's best invention follows from that. Horror has long used the unseen observer, the shot from behind a curtain that makes us feel someone is watching. Soderbergh turns that one shot into the film's entire grammar. The ancestor is Lady in the Lake (1947), the first feature told entirely through one character's eyes. Its problem was that the other actors had to play straight into the lens, because the camera was the hero. Presence turns the problem around. Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang and Eddy Maday have to play whole scenes, with no coverage to fall back on, while often turned partly away from a camera that is supposed to be invisible to them. Deleuze, borrowing from Pier Paolo Pasolini, names a kind of image in which the camera watches someone and we feel the camera's own presence while it does. Here that idea comes literally true. The moments when Chloe looks back at us are the camera being perceived by the person it is perceiving. Liang plays those moments with a quiet openness to the unseen, and the film rests on it.
Then there is sound. The ghost's view is tightly restricted, so the score by Zack Ryan stays low and the house does the talking. Voices come from other rooms, feet sound on the stairs, and arguments arrive before we can see them. Deleuze would call this the relative out-of-field: the frame opening onto a space next to it that we can't yet reach. The presence learns this family mostly by listening, and so do we, in pieces. Rebekah seems tangled in business dealings her husband doesn't trust. The marriage is strained. Rebekah openly favors her son, Tyler, who is careless and sometimes cruel. Chloe is grieving a friend who died of drugs. And there is Ryan, Tyler's friend, whose charm the camera seems to distrust well before anyone else does.
In the old Hollywood pattern, a situation produces an action and the action changes the situation. Deleuze saw postwar cinema break that chain and give us the seer, a figure who watches and endures and can't simply fix things. Presence makes the seer its protagonist and then makes the break into suspense. Can watching ever turn into doing? The film never lets that question rest, and we won't answer it here.
It also treats time unusually. Soderbergh edited the film himself, as Mary Ann Bernard, and with no cuts inside scenes, editing becomes a matter of how long each take lasts and how long the black screen between scenes holds. Those cuts to black work like blinks, or lapses. Days or weeks can pass during one, and we come back to a house where things have moved on. Films like 1917 and Birdman hide their cuts so that time seems seamless. Presence shows its cuts and makes each one a stretch of missing time. Deleuze describes the loosening of cause and effect in modern cinema as weak links. Here the weakness belongs to the narrator. A ghost has trouble keeping track of days.
The film's ancestors run through its staging. From Rope (1948) comes the idea of a thriller built from long takes in one domestic interior, with actors and furniture choreographed around a roving camera. From Halloween (1978) comes the prowling subjective shot through a suburban house on a stabilized rig. Presence keeps that gliding eye and drains the menace out of it, so the stalker's gaze becomes a guardian's. Poltergeist (1982) supplies a haunting focused on a family's daughter and played through the parents' marriage. David Koepp, who wrote Presence, had already written a domestic ghost story in Stir of Echoes (1999), where a dead girl reaches out to a living family. There the ghost wants something from them. Here it seems to want something for them. The film is too new for us to know its heirs, though it leaves a challenge for whoever comes next: a camera that has feelings, and a cut that has a duration.
What Presence does for film is small and real. Soderbergh has spent years setting himself limits and shooting fast and cheap, and here a limit becomes a character. When the operator's body is the ghost's body, camerawork becomes performance. And horror's most voyeuristic grammar turns out to be able to carry tenderness.
So when you watch it, keep track of where the camera is standing whenever it can do nothing. Notice when it comes closer and when it hides. That distance between seeing and helping is what the film is about.
Concepts in play
- the interval — The presence sees and overhears everything in the house but can act only through clumsy disturbances (a disturbed shelf, a toppled stack of things), so its perception is held in suspense and is mostly feeling, with very little action.
- dicisign — Strict subjectivity: every shot is the presence's view, and the camera is felt as a character. Chloe, the first to sense it, perceives the camera that is perceiving her, while the other actors play partly turned away from a lens that is supposed to be invisible to them.
- the mobile section (plan) — The camera leans in when the presence is curious, pulls back or rushes when it is agitated, and retreats into a closet to brood, so each movement expresses a change in the presence's emotional relation to the household.
- out-of-field-relative — Sound extends the restricted point of view: voices drift in from other rooms, footsteps sound on the stairs, and arguments are overheard before they are seen. The presence knows the household largely by listening.
- voyant — The staging makes the presence a bystander to conversations it can't join. Family secrets (Rebekah's dealings, the strained marriage, Chloe's grief) reach it in fragments, and its visual helplessness is the film's emotional core.
- weak-links — Scenes are separated by cuts to black that work like blinks or lapses in the ghost's awareness. Days or weeks pass between them, and the viewer has to piece together what happened in the gaps, the opposite of the hidden cuts in 1917 or Birdman.