The film that ‘Presence’ most reminded me of was Robert Zemeckis’s shlock supernatural-psychological thriller ‘What Lies Beneath’ which was made while Zemeckis was waiting for Tom Hanks to lose several stone so that he could be filmed in the second instalment of his more highbrow and awards-favourable ‘Cast Away’. Steven Soderbergh, himself no stranger to having two films out in one year (he was even up against himself in the Best Director category in 2001 for ‘Traffic’ and ‘Erin Brockovich’), made ‘Presence’ while filming another, larger canvas movie.

Soderbergh tends to work in different genres, from more studio-based material like ‘Oceans Eleven’ or ‘Magic Mike’ to small-scale phone-shot pictures. ‘Presence’ is his attempt to revisit and rework the haunted house genre, giving it a contemporary dimension in terms of the psychological and sexual trauma element which were far less explicit in earlier iterations of the ‘Turn of the Screw’ quality. Much of this film is shot from the point of view of a paranormal presence in the new home of a mixed race family who are battling the trauma of having two of the friends of the daughter, Chloe (Callina Liang), having died in related but inexplicable drugs-based episodes.

Familiar tropes are on display here relating to the battle between the supernatural and the secular, though on a less intense scale than we saw in ‘The Exorcist’ with its extreme binary delineation of the way forces outside of our control and even ones which are alien to our own worldview can manifest in ways that cause us to rethink our very value system. ‘Presence’ is set entirely within the single space of a home, where the camera uses the ghost’s first-person point of view to underscore tensions in the family dynamic, where the marriage is in freefall and the children are traumatized. Yet this is not a demonic entity in the mode of ‘The Exorcist’, but rather a ghost that may not even know what its purpose and destiny might be.

It seems even to be hanging around for a future trauma to manifest, rather than to be hanging on to an unresolved past of the kind that lies at the heart of a film like ‘Ghost’. The family have buried secrets – in a manner of speaking, ghosts – of their own to deal with, such that the paranormal activity on display is really an extension of the fissures and secrets at the family’s heart. But there are also moments that don’t seem convincing, as in one early scene where we see books being transported from a bed to a bookshelf. This feels like a cop-out and a concession to the sort of genre expectations which this film is otherwise keen to subvert.

There is also the curious matter that on one occasion when we suspect something malevolent will happen to Chloe the ghost intervenes to protect her. But when the same thing happens a second time the ghost does not appear. Maybe Soderbergh is showing us how not everything, and certainly not the supernatural, follows a rational or predictable template. If so then this arguably bestows an even greater depth on a film which is liable at times to feel quite flimsy and as ethereal as the ghost which hovers, floats and swoops through the stairs, hallways and bedrooms of the family home.