Presence

Few directors in Hollywood have as eclectic a style and as varied a history as Steven Soderbergh. Say what you will about his films over the last three decades, but he has never stood still or stopped challenging himself, and most people can point to a film or two, whether it's part of the Oceans trilogy, Traffic, Erin Brokovich, or the depressing Contagion, that they like.

So it's very much in keeping with Soderbergh's modus operandi to suddenly make a horror film with NEON, which has recently had a lot of success with Longlegs and Cuckoo, but this is not only a significant genre shift, but also a kind of dogma film in that there is a kind of built-in constraint that plays a pretty central role in the way you understand the film. And by the way, it's called Presence.

First of all, the entire film is set in just one house, exclusively. Secondly, the entire film is shot in first-person perspective, and whose perspective is that? Well, it is, apparently if nothing else, the very "presence" that haunts the Payne family in New Jersey. Say what you will about execution and effect here, and of course we will, but in terms of pushing the boundaries of how we understand the role of the camera in cinema, and especially how suspense can be built if what you're afraid to see is always "behind' you" - that takes some courage, and a willingness to turn expectations upside down - queue Soderbergh.

In Presence there are no jump scares, there is only the eternal suspense that comes naturally from the feeling that something is wrong. Something indeterminate, something vague and sinister that is always, throughout the film, just out of reach of the camera and your field of vision. That's kind of how it has to be, since you are the "ghost" here, you're the ghost, you're the one present and lurking around the Payne family through a series of lengthy takes that often drag on a little too long, all in order to create suspense out of the fact that you're watching a family that doesn't know they're being watched.

That in itself is an innovative premise, and all the camerawork, sound design, and stage choreography is built around this one premise. It's conceptual filmmaking in the extreme, where all storytelling serves a gimmick. It's a bit like Hardcore Henry, while being something completely different, but the analogy stands somewhere in its power.

It's also the camera movement, the lighting techniques, and the choreography that has to be right for the camera in first-person to impress. It's Lucy Liu's mesmerising performance as Rebecca Payne, it's the thick tapestry of sound that makes the silence so incredibly loud, it's like a technical exercise in Soderbergh getting off to a good start and holding your attention all the way to the end credits.

But at the same time, as a self-confessed horror aficionado, there's something a little more tangible missing here, or the evocation of something our characters can be genuinely afraid of. This angle is also used as a kind of voyeur, where the focus is placed on family dynamics, deception and love - but at times you can actually forget that you are... well, the ghost, and instead you just treat it as a more down-to-earth camera angle, and that's not the point.

In other words, a horror film shouldn't overexpose its monster, that's for sure, but in Presence you know pretty acutely that the monster will never be exposed at all, and it takes away some of the suspense the film sometimes masterfully manages to build.