Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Steven Soderbergh is a talented director, as well as a notable trendspotter. His career has long zigzagged between newsy subjects (Contagion, The Laundromat) and bankable genres (Out of Sight, the Ocean’s franchise.) Going where the money and the moment is, the result has grown into a fascinating map of 35 years in popular culture. So it is that with Presence, Soderbergh now arrives for the first time at one of the few safe bets left in a fractured film industry: the teen-centred supernatural chiller. You sense the project has dual purpose for Soderbergh: keeping business going, but a novel creative challenge too. The stage is classically simple, a suburban American haunted house. But it comes with a particular twist. First seen up for sale, that much will instantly trigger folk memories of genre classic The Amityville Horror. A nuclear family is soon in situ, with parents played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, and teenage kids by Callina Liang and Eddy Maday. And all is bored normality, aside from fleeting hints of the untoward. The olds whisper about a recent misfortune befalling their daughter. A contractor won’t go in that bedroom. And you come to wonder whose point of view the camera is shooting from anyway, hovering about hallways, gazing out from upper-storey windows.In his nomadic career, Soderbergh has been a big-screen name happy to work for Netflix and HBO. Presence, though, is clearly made to be watched in the cinema, with a crowd, preferably while being under 19. No shade in that. The film is a neat exercise in addressing its target audience. (The weakness may be the indecision about how much attention to pay the kids’ parents, whose subplots really just take up space.) If the downside of working as fast as Soderbergh does is how scrappy the films sometimes feel, here the rough finish fits the form: a smart quick-fire frightener from a ghost in the Hollywood machine.★★★☆☆In cinemas from January 24
