Are you being watched? Soderbergh’s ghost voyeur movie taps strange truths

Presence, the story of a family haunting where the camera’s eye is the spectre’s point of view, draws on what are for many people all too palpable phenomena

Steven Soderbergh’s new film Presence this week heralds the return of a cinematic technique familiar to many fans of scary movies: the point-of-view shot. Viewing a scene through the eyes of an antagonist – such as the extended opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween – can be a chilling way of drawing viewers into the action, making us feel like we are both the watcher and being watched. When combined with sustained shots without an edit, we become eavesdroppers and voyeurs, lingering long past when the scene should have moved on. From Hitchcock’s Rear Window to Haneke’s Hidden, a camera that holds it gaze can fill us with a creeping sense of dread.

Presence uses both tricks, telling us a familiar story (a family with baggage move into a haunted house) in an unfamiliar way. Told from the perspective of a ghostly presence, we witness every scene via the point-of-view shot, sweeping between rooms to hear intimate conversations and hovering over characters as they sleep. As the ghost we watch through upstairs windows, peer round closet doors, and recede into corners while scenes unfold.

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