There was a time when Steven Soderbergh tried to retire. Now he’s back to directing one movie a year. Presence just opened today here in Finland and Black Bag, his next movie, opens here in less than a month.

The conceit here is that the whole movie is shot from the point of view of a ghost. It moves kind of too slowly at times to be believable as an actual point of view of a person, but that’s just me looking for things like this. The movie was shot on a Sony a9 III, which looks like this:

It was carried on as small of a stabilization rig as possible, so as not to make it cumbersome (and it needs to move pretty fast at times). This isn’t the first time Soderbergh has made a movie with small camera. In fact, his Unsane from 2018 was shot on an iPhone with a special lense.

The logical next step from the production method is that the movie has on average very long takes. Of course, there might be hidden ones, but according to the trivia on IMDb, there’s only 33 cuts, which would mean 34 shots.

Of course, this gives the movie a unique feel. The ghost moves freely within the house without anyone noticing (mostly). It can witness various events and follow the drama within the family that has just recently moved there. The mother is stressing out because she has taken part in some kind of a white collar crime, her husband is vaguely aware of this, but doesn’t really know what to do about it, their son is a real go-getter in his mother’s eyes, which of course means that he is really a piece of shit, and their daughter is struggling with trauma as her best friend OD’d and died recently.

All of this could have easily felt like an unnecessary attempt to get some novelty value, but the family is interesting enough to maintain our interest. On top of that, we do learn about the ghost. Not much, but it clearly is protective of the daughter, in who’s closet it apparently lives in. Also, it clearly feels like it’s intruding in her life as well, but can’t really leave either.

Okay, so where is this going? I am generally very good predicting this, but I did not have any clue. The climax of the movie doesn’t come out of nowhere, but it is definitely surprising. Now, surprising twists can often be unsatisfying, but not here. It’s actually great. And, as my writing teacher told me a long, long time ago, you should have that one additional twist after the seemingly final twist, and the movie does that in a very emotionally satisfying way as well.

All in all, the experiment paid off. While I didn’t find this especially intensive, apparently many other people did and some even had to walk out because of that. That does sound like an ad though. “So intensive some people can’t take it”. The movie is still good. It isn’t just playing around with a technique, but there’s an actual reason to do it and it works out nicely.