Steven Soderbergh has, from the outside, a perfect career: two movies in 2025, with a trailer for the second one playing before the first. Presence and Black Bag, both written by David Koepp, are the world’s Soderbergh films for the year, a small weird one, and a bigger blander one. They’ll satisfy, but that’s it. The worker bee has never made a masterpiece, or even a really great movie; Soderbergh never dips below a certain level, and it’s comfortable, but sometimes it makes me think of Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance churning out books “like links of sausage,” an overheard putdown by someone with more refined tastes. Someone who wouldn’t read books like hers, or the romance novels written by Kathleen Turner and Jack Nicholson in Romancing the Stone and As Good as it Gets.
He’s made many hits, and a few that’ve endured in the popular consciousness: Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels which have long since outshined its 1960 source; the Magic Mike trilogy; and, perhaps this a stretch 25 years on, Traffic and Erin Brockovich. Those were major motion pictures of the year 2000, and Soderbergh improbably won Best Director at the Oscars for Traffic while competing against himself in the same category for Erin Brockovich—and so, because he wasn’t expecting it, he accepted the award and gave his speech close to blackout drunk. He did pretty well under the circumstances.
Like friend David Fincher, Soderbergh has embraced digital filmmaking and streaming, without leaving the cinema behind entirely like Fincher. His “experiment” films this decade, besides Presence, are: Let Them All Talk (largely improvised by the cast and shot on the QM2 with natural light and very little equipment), No Sudden Move (filmed entirely with a fisheye lens), and Kimi (single location pandemic thriller). All of them were distributed by HBO during the pandemic, and subsequently received little to no theatrical bookings, while Presence got picked up by Neon at last year’s Sundance; Black Bag will be distributed by Focus Features in the United States and by Universal internationally. Soderbergh will return to theaters despite maintaining his pace, if not his cultural visibility (if he ever really had any).
Presence is a haunted house movie filmed from the perspective of a ghost. The only known actor in it is Lucy Liu. Koepp is right that 85 minutes is enough for such a strict conceit, but Presence is a stronger movie than Soderbergh’s recent gimmick pieces. Like shot-on-iPhones Unsane and 2013’s Side Effects, this is an unnerving movie precisely because the director behind it is such a blank slate. Soderbergh isn’t a vessel, he’s a processor, churning out programmers as if it were the 1930s. He’ll never make a masterpiece because he’s a director like Norman Taurog, or Richard Fleischer on a good day. His aesthetic anonymity isn’t a result of studio smothering, he’s just not a particularly interesting guy, just a hard worker and a skilled craftsman.
But there’s no feeling, everything’s an exercise, even the “big” movies. That’s the only thing that’s surprising about Soderbergh’s continued success: he doesn’t make movies, he makes movies about movies, exercises in moviemaking. He may be the only true journeyman left, James Mangold and Sam Mendes aside; he may return again and again to the absurdity of American bureaucracy and creative corporate accounting, but he’s not known for that. He’s not known, primarily, for his experiments. He’s not known for Ocean’s Eleven, or sex, lies, & videotape, quickly eclipsed by Reservoir Dogs as the quintessential “indie movie” of its time. Soderbergh isn’t “known” for anything, and that’s exactly what he wants—he can do anything. But it’s also why he’ll never do anything great, because, ultimately, there’s not that much to draw from. Presence has nothing to say about ghosts, or the afterlife, or religion—its primary interest is, like all of Soderbergh’s “experiments,” itself. It’s certainly better than the garbage American moviegoers have been subjected during the 2020s, but the multiplex needs more than reliable programmers like Soderbergh to survive. I really like his work—I wish he’d take a couple of years to make his masterpiece, if he has one in him.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith