84 min | R | January 24, 2025 | Neon
Soderbergh shoots a haunted house movie from the ghost’s point of view. The formal experiment works. The emotional core lands. This is what mastery looks like.
Steven Soderbergh has nothing left to prove. He made Traffic and Out of Sight and the Ocean’s trilogy and Magic Mike and Logan Lucky. He can do anything. So he made a horror film shot entirely from the first-person perspective of a ghost watching a family move into its house. The gimmick could have been exactly that. A gimmick. Instead it becomes the engine that drives everything.
The camera floats through rooms and observes. The family, Lucy Liu as the mother, Chris Sullivan as the father, Callina Liang and Eddy Maday as the children, Julia Fox in a small but memorable role, they live their lives unaware they are being watched. The perspective creates unease that never dissipates. You are voyeur and protector at once. The film uses this tension to build dread without relying on jump scares or loud noises.
David Koepp’s script does real work with family dynamics and grief and the ways trauma echoes through generations. The ghost is not the villain. The house is not evil. The horror comes from watching people hurt each other and being powerless to intervene. That’s a different kind of haunting. The performances are calibrated perfectly. Liu carries the emotional weight with precision. The young actors never feel like they are performing for the camera because the camera is not performing for them.
Soderbergh continues to prove that craft and vision matter. No waste.