Steven Soderbergh's "Presence" is steadily building a reputation as an unconventional ghost story, with the maverick director choosing to, in effect, play the ghost himself and shoot the entire film from the ghost's point of view. As my review out of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival (where the film premiered) explains, this technique allows "Presence" to straddle the line between a found footage movie and a character Pov film in a subversively clever way: While the camera is disembodied enough to move at will and be present in situations that another human person couldn't observe, Soderbergh never lets us forget the fact that there's an identity to this point of view, even if the entity itself doesn't know who they are at first.

This perspective means that "Presence" is less a terrifying supernatural horror film and more of a thoughtful, character-based thriller, because after all, we know where the ghost...