“Presence” will soon be felt.
Steven Soderbergh’s highly anticipated ghost story, written by David Koepp and starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan and Julia Fox, will be released theatrically by Neon in January 2025. The studio released a brand-new teaser for the psychological thriller on Wednesday, which you can watch below.
The approach that the teaser takes is nifty — it just lists off some of Soderbergh’s past masterpieces (among them: “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Traffic” and “Out of Sight”), while a camera slowly moves from outside of a suburban house to inside. That’s it. The implication is clear: “Presence” is an event, as only the second Soderbergh movie to be released theatrically since 2018’s “Unsane” and the other film (“Magic Mike’s Last Dance”) was made for streaming before being changed at the last minute to a theatrical release. That really does make “Presence” special.
“Presence” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. While the less said about the movie, the better (you’ll want to be surprised), its main hook is that it’s a ghost story told from the point of view of the ghost, told through long, unbroken shots as the presence glides through the house.
Soderbergh, of course, has already lined up his next feature, another collaboration with Koepp (their third, after “Kimi” and “Presence”) called “Black Bag.” The spy movie, being released by Focus Features, stars Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Regé-Jean Page and Pierce Brosnan. It is coming out on March 14, 2025. Two theatrically released Soderbergh movies in three months? We are so back.
Julie M. Anderson and Ken Meyer are producers on “Presence,” with Soderbergh, as always, serving as his own cinematographer and editor.
Neon is on quite a roll when it comes to horror with Sydney Sweeney’s “Immaculate” opening earlier this year and Osgood Perkins’ serial killer thriller “Longlegs” becoming the company’s biggest hit ever, edging past Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning “Parasite.” Neon also has “Cuckoo,” starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens, opening this weekend. And a month after “Presence” (on Feb. 21, 2025), Neon is releasing Perkins’ next film, an adaptation of the Stephen King short story, “The Monkey.”
“Presence” opens on Jan. 15, 2025.
