Directed by Steven Soderbergh, this film in theaters on February 5, 2025 promises to have its effect thanks to a choice of striking staging. But is it enough to make a good horror thriller? Our criticism.
Haunted houses are legion in horror cinema. But the rarer are the films that adopt the point of view of the ghost itself! It is the bias in daring of Presencelast feature by Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky) Released in the cinema on February 5, 2025. For almost 1:25 am and on a succession of sequence plans, the spectator sees in the place of this ghost, locked in an American suburban house in which a new family with secrets and relations complexes moved … before suspecting his presence. But is the real danger located inside or outside?
The director here uses his greatest asset, namely his ability to test and invent new devices to put at the service of his story. While we could have expected yet another haunted house film, the choice of staging, which is that of positioning the public from the point of view of the ghostly presence of the places, turns out to be devilishly effective to give the film A feeling of stranger while putting the spectator as a voyeur of a bourgeois, neurotic and dysfunctional family.
Effective on the form, the bottom hurts more on the bottom. Less poetic and overwhelming than Ghost Before him, which resumed the same principle in a less radical way, Presence Haps during his first part, when the spectator discovers in a dotted and strange way the tensions that draw this American family. The second part is more laborious, with a resolution which seems almost in vain and ends in an almost artificial way, without the choice of staging having had a real impact on his intrigue. There remains a feature film that dares and offers a controlled thriller for this early 2025.
Synopsis – A family that has just moved into a new house discovers with amazement that a mysterious presence seems to haunt the place.