Presence

Presence is the most technically inventive horror film of early 2025. It is also a quietly progressive film wearing an arthouse horror mask.

Steven Soderbergh's latest finds the director in full experiment mode. The film is shot entirely from the ghost's POV: the camera drifts through rooms, watches characters from doorways, hovers protectively over the family's neglected daughter Chloe. It is a formal innovation that actually works. The immersive perspective creates genuine dread because you never know what the presence is thinking. You only know what it watches.

The Payne family has just moved into a new suburban home. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the family's ambitious driver: career-focused, emotionally distant, engaged in undisclosed white-collar crime that she has recruited her teenage son Tyler into covering up. Chris (Chris Sullivan) is warm, attentive to Chloe, and largely powerless in the family's dynamic. Tyler is his mother's accomplice and a bully. Chloe is emotionally fragile after a friend's death and genuinely sensitive to the presence in the house.

Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp are not subtle about where the film's sympathies lie. Every scene the presence appears in is a scene involving Chloe. When Tyler catfishes a female classmate to obtain a nude photo and then leaks it, the presence destroys his room while the entire family watches. When Chloe cries, the presence closes her door to give her privacy. When Ryan and Chloe begin to kiss, the presence interrupts. The supernatural force is explicitly protective of Chloe and explicitly hostile to anything that threatens her autonomy, safety, or emotional state.

This is skillful filmmaking. The problem is what it is saying.

The family structure the film critiques is recognizable: an ambitious mother whose career ambition has led to moral compromise, a compliant teenage son being groomed into her worldview, a passive father who cares but cannot act, and a sensitive daughter who sees the family clearly and suffers for it. The presence sides with the daughter. The presence is the film's moral arbiter, and its values are Chloe's values.

For conservative viewers, the specific discomfort will be the film's framing of parental authority. Rebekah is right about nothing. Chris is kind but useless. The film's resolution involves Chloe's emotional reality being validated by a force outside the family structure. The traditional family as protective institution is the film's villain, at least in the form it takes in the Payne household.

Soderbergh does not make bad films. This one is genuinely unsettling, formally daring, and anchored by strong performances. Callina Liang as Chloe is a genuine discovery. But conservative viewers should know what they are watching. The ghost is not neutral. It has a worldview. That worldview is progressive.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Absent/Ineffectual Father Figure	4	Moderate	High	5.6
Female Ambition as Family Destructor	3	Moderate	High	4.2
Supernatural Force as Progressive Moral Arbiter	3	Low	High	7.56
Institutional Authority Undermined (Family)	2	Moderate	Moderate	2
Male Character as Bad Actor (Catfishing/Distribution)	3	High	Moderate	3
TOTAL WOKE				22.4

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Personal Responsibility for Corruption	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Father Loves His Daughter	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Moral Consequences Are Real	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Grief as Real and Honored	2	High	Moderate	1.4
Truth-Telling Rewarded	2	High	Low	0.7
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				8.4

Score Margin: -10 WOKE