Steven Soderbergh’s New Thriller Presence Gets Mysterious Teaser

It’s almost time to experience a new ghost story from legendary director Steven Soderbergh. On Wednesday, NEON released the first teaser trailer for Presence, the highly-anticipated horror thriller from Soderbergh. After premiering at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the project is expected to finally make its debut in theaters early next year.

The ensemble cast of Presence includes Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Julia Fox, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, and West Muholland. Filming for Presence took place in 2023, with an interim agreement that allowed the production to occur amid the year’s SAG-AFTRA strike.

What Is Presence About?

In Presence, a family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone. The film uses first-person point-of-view sequences, from the viewpoint of the titular “presence”, to tell its story. 

“That was what was appealing about it,” Soderbergh explained to Filmmaker Magazine. “Because by some measure, it’s the simplest idea I’ve ever had. If I’m speaking to students, I’ll talk about the dissolution or at least muting of your ego, so that you can listen to what the thing wants. Moment to moment, on a macro level, what does the thing want, and how does it achieve it? And this was the walking definition of asking yourself, “What does it want?” One of the reasons that I wanted to shoot in chronological order—and, except for two scenes, was able to do that—was that I wanted you to see [the presence] learn how to be. The only way to do that is to really block the scenes in sequence and then start thinking about what it knows so far, what it’s interested in, what it’s trying to extract. As the film goes on, you can see the shots get more — I don’t know if elaborate is the right word, but they get more directed. Like, it knows more about where it should be if it’s trying to pick up information. And that was a really fun thing. There would be takes where I would yell, “I don’t know, I panned, I anticipated something, but I need to be slightly behind.” And as it starts to learn, it can anticipate, and it’s not lagging as much as it does at the beginning. All that was really fun to play with.”

Presence is set to be released exclusively in theaters on January 17, 2025.