“Presence” is a fresh 2025 movie release directed by Steven Soderbergh that has been highly anticipated but left much to be desired. It came with the unique feature of being completely shot from the first-person perspective, but amid experimentation, the entire plot and story of the movie was lost.

The movie immediately caught people’s attention when the first trailer was released. Its first-person point of view was something new that no one else had seen before. All audiences knew before they stepped into the theatre was that they were in the viewpoint of the ghost. 

This led to an interesting narrative by being like most common ghost tropes – stuck in a home – acting as a silent third-party viewer to the family dynamics that inhabit the home. In the trailer, the ghost is depicted as an ominous force, one you would commonly see in a true supernatural movie. However, throughout the whole movie, this is not seen, the ghost rarely causes any trouble except for two scenes, one in the middle of the movie and another at the end.

This itself paid off, even with the movie’s flaws, it set itself apart from the typical supernatural-horror genre pack. The act of being confined to the first-person perspective helps the movie’s atmosphere feel claustrophobic.

However “Presence” also suffers from being a “bottle movie”, a type of writing where the story only takes place in one setting and the environment never changes. This both does a service and a disservice to the whole movie itself, it helps the unnerving feeling the movie tries to develop but also makes it so the plot cannot be developed outside of the house. Leaving various characters’ development up to “tell don’t show”.

Plot points like the mother’s semi-illegal occupation were barely given any time to develop, same with the plot line of the father wanting to get a divorce. Audiences get no time to see the development of these plot points and they either never get brought up again or are resolved randomly by the end of the movie.

This uniqueness could’ve been capitalized if the plot was just a little firmer, instead of the barely noticeable one that could easily be assumed to be exposition in ⅔ of the movie. Documenting a family’s experience with a supernatural entity that is completely benevolent is simply not strong enough for the main plot.

The most jarring example of the film skipping over pre-established plot points is Ryan, Chloe’s boyfriend and the antagonist of the story.

From the start he’s presented as weird, he is constantly telling Chloe how she’s in control and that he would never make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. His off-putting personality was most apparent during his monologue that he had no control in his life but desperately wanted it, then completely flipping it and saying that Chloe ‘has all the control.’ This weird oxymoron was incredibly noticeable and made his character investing.

However, to say that he was the one orchestrating the murder of her, her best friend, and another girl in the same scene as her, is an extremely far stretch that suffers from the fact that his character was simply not developed enough to undertake such a detrimental role in the story.

We are given no context to any of these murders, they just say he did them and that’s the end of it. 

It also does not help that we barely know anything about him, he almost appears to just be this mysterious force that shows up–he has no character outside of a forceful nature. So when he inevitably drugs Chloe in an attempt to kill her, the audience isn’t scared or frightened, more just confused.

This confusion is further added when Chloe’s brother wakes up from his drugged sleep and kills Ryan and himself. It’s a jaw-dropping scene–and not in a good way. 

It comes off not as heroic but rather as if the writers had no other idea on how to end the story but still wanted to make sure the audience was shocked.

It felt like it was just put there – as if there was a longer, more overarching, story that was cut for something more digestible and feature-length. What could have been a compelling exploration of grief, family, and the supernatural, rather feels like an experiment that never quite sticks the landing as well as it leaped.