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I Can’t Stop Thinking About the Excellent Ending to Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Presence'

By Andrew Sanford | News | January 31, 2025 |

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Header Image Source: Photo by Sonia Recchia/Getty Images

January can be a weird time for movies. That has always bummed me out because it’s my birthday month and I love going to the movies. The month comes after studio Oscar pushes, and while plenty of those films are often still in theaters come January, many aren’t. Plus, I avoid double dipping unless I really love something. So, I will often indulge in horror movies and bad movies, which are usually dropped in January, as I still insist on going when I can. Sometimes, a movie is released in January that knocks me on my ass. This year, that film was Presence.

There will be massive spoilers for Presence in this piece. If you haven’t seen it, please close this, go see it, and come back.

I knew almost nothing about Presence before I went to see it. I hadn’t seen a trailer or read a plot description or reviews. I didn’t even know who was in it! All I knew was that it was a ghost story from the ghost’s POV and that Steven Soderbergh had directed it with a script from David Koepp. That was enough to get me in my seat. What unfurled before me was a gripping family drama that happened to include a ghost. I went in so cold that, for about the first twenty minutes, I thought the ghost and the family might never interact! That it was more of a voyeur. That is not the case.

Being observed by a mysterious ghost is the Payne family of four. They move into a new home and we see them acclimate, fight, and grow. Seeing what the ghost sees and experiencing time how it does, we bounce around between shots to see what the family is up to. The mother and father (played by Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu) are dealing with friction in their marriage (and Liu’s potential legal troubles) while trying to navigate the contentious relationship between their son and daughter (played by Callina Liang and Eddy Maday). It doesn’t help that Sullivan feels more connected to their daughter while Liu fawns over their son.

The family dynamics are deeply engrossing. It may help that I am a father to two children and often wonder what our lives will look like as we get older. Also, enough cannot be said about every actor in this film and how much they bring to their roles. Even a relatively cringeworthy monologue that comes from the end of the film by a family “friend” played by West Mulholland doesn’t derail the film because he’s so damn good. The other detail I knew about this film was that it’s barely 85 minutes long, which excited me greatly, and yet I happily would have stayed in my seat another hour.

Familial drama lays an exquisite base for this film, all while knowing something supernatural is lurking in the shadows. That element is teased throughout until the ghost makes its presence (nailed it) known to the family, driving Dad and daughter closer but mother and son have a hard time accepting it. It’s another reason the movie works so well. Everything that happens is in service to their relationships with each other. Everything. It takes what could be bland or uninspired plot points in the hands of other filmmakers and actors and elevates them. The film feels honest and lived in and so, when s*** goes south, you care.

Running throughout the film is a plot in which the daughter in the family has recently lost two friends to overdoses. She even assumes that one of them is the ghost. Her grief is rejected by her mother and brother, while her dad offers his support. Meanwhile, she’s introduced to the family “friend” through her brother and forms a relationship with him. They hook up, despite the brother warning the friend against doing so, and plan a weekend together while the parents are out of town. It’s during the first night of this weekend that things get bad.

The family is split over their acceptance of the ghost at this point, two of them acknowledging its presence (BOOM) with the other two thinking it’s a scam or freakish nonsense. Regardless, the ghost continues to go to great lengths to interact with them. When the family brings in a medium to communicate with the ghost, she is accompanied by her husband who hits them up for money, hence the scam presumption. But, the medium returns later, warning the father that the ghost is there to prevent something bad from happening, leading us to the fateful weekend.

The daughter and son are both drugged by the family “friend’ who reveals himself to have killed the daughter’s two friends and made the murders look like overdoses. He plans to do the same to her, while her brother is passed out downstairs. However, the ghost manages to wake the brother and he fires upstairs, tackling the friend through a second-story window. He saves his sister, but he and his “friend” die. The ghost watches the events unfold and runs over to look down at the bodies through the window. It is the same window we see the ghost looking through when the film begins.

While in the home, the medium mentions how the ghost experiences time differently. It’s revealed why in the closing moments of the film. We find the house to be empty, as it is at the beginning of the film. The father and daughter step outside as the mother takes one last look around. Then, a sound beckons her into another room where she looks in the mirror and sees the face of the ghost for the first time. It is her son. As Kayleigh mentioned in a piece yesterday, Lucy Liu plays the moment exquisitely, and it will stick with me for a very long time. She breaks down in a grief-fueled outburst and her family comes in to comfort her. The ghost then finally leaves the house and ascends to whatever comes next.

The end of the film is equal parts devastating and satisfying. All the pieces laid out before are brought together in a way that almost feels like a plan coming to fruition in a heist movie. Liu’s pain is real and agonizing. I immediately started thinking about all the hints that were laid out about the ghost’s identity (there were many) and it even makes expository details make more sense. Especially the note about the ghost experiencing time differently.

I may be looking too much into this, or just pointing out the obvious, but I believe the movie begins at the end. We see (through the ghost’s POV) the window that he will eventually fall out of. Then, we see the empty home, followed by the opening title card and then the family coming into the empty home for the first time. I assumed that the film was showing us the ghost exploring the empty home before the new occupants arrived. Now, I believe we see the ghost’s final moments before he reveals himself to his mother and ascends.

What’s incredible is that either answer would be satisfactory and both are left up to interpretation. Presence feels that much richer thanks to this ending. It successfully melds the family drama with the ghostly presence (THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM) with surgical precision. I loved this movie. I loved this ending and I may end up doing a repeat cinema visit in January after all.