THE CURRENT CINEMA - GHOST'S-EYE VIEW

“Presence.”

- BY RICHARD BRODY

Lucy Liu stars in Steven Soderbergh’s supernatural mystery.

Although Steven Soderbergh started out as an independent filmmaker, he may be Hollywood’s last true believer. He made fine studio movies back when star-studded genre pictures were still studios’ stock-in-trade; witness “Out of Sight” (1998), “Erin Brockovich” (2000), and the “Ocean’s” trilogy (2001-07). Now that studios are in this case, packed into the venerable genre of horror. The movie is a metaphysical mystery, a sort of American gothic in which a warm and inviting old suburban house becomes the shivery site of a haunting, a confinement, and a menace. At the start, the house in question is, to all appearances, empty—at least, it’s devoid of furniture, because focussing mainly on franchises and remakes, Soderbergh is working independently again, but he’s continuing to make the kind of genre films at which Hollywood used to excel—the heist film “Logan Lucky” (2017), the thriller “Unsane” (2018), and even “Magic Mike” (2012)—and doing so in a homespun way, with an air of playfulness and improvisation, sometimes shooting on iPhones. The cinematic house of worship may be closed, but he’s holding services at home with devotion as earnest as ever, though he can’t resist a winking acknowledgment of the homey clutter in plain sight.

In his new film, “Presence,” Soderbergh approaches domesticity with a similar blend of solemnity and whimsy—it’s for sale. A real-estate agent named Cece (Julia Fox) arrives just ahead of her clients, a well-to-do family of four—parents Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) and their teenage children, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). Cece hints that the house, new to the market and situated in a coveted school district, will sell quickly. In mere moments, Rebecca, a hard-driving businesswoman, makes the deal.