The Ending of Steven Soderbergh’s Spooky New Movie Gave Me Full-On Goose Bumps – Slate

This article contains the presence of spoilers.Presence, Steven Soderbergh’s latest, is a tight 85-minute family story set in a single absolutely gorgeous foursquare suburban house. In the first scene of the film, a real estate agent (played, entertainingly, by Julia Fox) sells the property to hard-driving businesswoman Rebecca (Lucy Liu), who cares mostly about whether it’s in the right school district. The family—Rebecca, good dad Chris (Chris Sullivan), callow jock Tyler (Eddy Maday), and withdrawn, grieving daughter Chloe (Callina Liang)—moves in, and slowly falls apart.Soderbergh (under his pseudonym Peter Andrews) shot the film from the point of view of the Presence, an entity that haunts the house. The Presence—more trapped energy than traditional ghost—watches as Chris tries to get his wife to care that their daughter is barely functioning in the aftermath of the death of her friend Nadia from a drug overdose; as their son’s friend Ryan (West Mulholland) secretly seduces their daughter; and as Rebecca buttonholes Tyler at the kitchen island and drunkenly tells her son that she’s closer to him than any other human being, and that it’s OK to do anything for the people you love.The Presence watches Chloe closely, like a guard dog, but seems also to dwell on her mother: how little she gives Chloe, how often she’s on her laptop and her phone, how obsessed she is with her son and his many successes. We’re judging this bad mother, but so is the ghost. Chloe believes that the Presence is her recently deceased friend, because of the way it acts, and “Nadia is the Presence” becomes the red herring that seems plausible until the very end of the film.Some scenes provoke the Presence. When Ryan and Chloe are hooking up, it hides in her closet, as if it’s ashamed to see. When Tyler boasts to his parents about a shitty prank he and his friends played on a girl at school, the Presence angrily trashes his room. The first time Ryan drugs Chloe’s drink, the Presence reaches out and shakes the table, until her glass of OJ falls to the ground. Each of the scenes stands alone, with a hard cut between them—it’s as if the Presence gets tired and fades out for a while, returning whenever this terrible family’s bad mojo comes to another crescendo.When a psychic comes to assess the house, she tells the family that Chloe probably sees the Presence because she’s been recently traumatized. The psychic’s belief is that the ghost may not understand its own identity, or its place in time and space: It could be from the past or the future. Rebecca and Tyler—people who don’t enjoy feeling vulnerable—reject the psychic’s very presence in the house, but Chris tells Chloe he believes her. Then, Chris and Rebecca go away for a night, and Chloe and Ryan make a plan to be together. Ryan drugs Tyler, then Chloe. Then, as Chloe lies almost comatose on her bed, Ryan reveals that he was the one who killed Nadia, as well as another girl who’s recently died of what was judged to be a drug overdose. (Ryan, who turns out to be a real sick little freak, uses plastic wrap to suffocate the girls he’s drugged, while they’re passed out, so that the coroner will classify the death as an OD.)The Presence bangs at the barrier separating it from the scene unfolding in Chloe’s bedroom, but it fails to get through. So it rushes down the house’s (gorgeous) stairs and throws everything it has at Tyler, who wakes from his Ambien haze, immediately shouts “Chloe!,” runs upstairs, and tackles Ryan, sending both boys out the window onto the concrete of the driveway, where they die.In the movie’s denouement, Rebecca gazes out the dining-room window, clearly racked with grief. The house is empty again, and the family is about to move out. The Presence stands to her left. For the first time, she seems to sense it there, perhaps because she too is now grieving. She tells Chloe she needs one more moment in the house, and walks into the living room, where there is a beautiful antique inlaid mirror over a mantelpiece. Rebecca looks into the mirror, and there, right behind her, is … Tyler! “You came back to save her,” Rebecca says, weeping, collapsing to the floor and seeming to get it all at once.I am slow, so I also finally got it at this moment: Tyler was the Presence, stuck in a time loop, in the same house as his living self, fading in and out of consciousness and alignment with the events of the real world. The Tyler Presence keeps realizing things about his family members, and about himself, as he was, then retreating back into darkness. Then, the terrible circumstance of Ryan trying to kill Chloe catalyzes him and makes him wake his living body up, so that he can go save his sister, and die—again.This ending freaked me the heck out, but not in the way of a traditional jump scare. (“When I hear the word ‘horror,’ I see blood,” said Soderbergh to an interviewer who asked him whether he considered this film to fit in the genre. “The fact that there’s no blood in Presence, and no real jump-scares—it’s not designed that way—makes me wonder if that’s the right term. … We call it a ghost movie; I guess that’s accurate.”) I jumped because, like Rebecca, I was putting everything together and realizing I’d been a fool.“Inside you is a good man, and I can’t wait to see him come out,” Chris counsels Tyler earlier in the film, in a bit of foreshadowing, as he scolds his son for being unkind to his grieving sister. Presence is about the last remaining energy of a person coming together to be the “good man” that Tyler never got to be. For parents trying to keep their children safe until they’re better at decisionmaking, Presence may not be a horror movie, but it will for sure leave you chilled to the bone.
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Source: https://slate.com/culture/2025/01/presence-movie-2025-steven-soderbergh-ending-explained.html