Despite sharing its name with a Led Zeppelin album, Presence is a haunted house movie and not the Zeppelin documentary that came out the same week. They should have called it Houses of the Unholy to avoid confusion.

Following in the footsteps of last year’s In a Violent Nature, which told a slasher flick entirely from the point of view of the killer, Presence shows its ghost story from the perspective of the ghost. This makes for an interesting deconstruction of the sub-genre, but ultimately employs the same old clumsy clichés, complete with non-sence psychic and ghost abilities that vary wildly from scene to scene. And whichever direction you approach a plot hole, you’re still going to fall into it.

The effect is structurally compelling but narratively lacking, following a fractious family into the haunted house and down various dead ends. The disconcerting technique is testament to the professional restlessness of director/editor/cinematographer Steven Soderbergh, who oscillates between crowd-pleasing franchises (Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike) and cinematic experiments; he shot 2018’s Unsane and 2019’s High Flying Bird on an iPhone, which is impressive considering one only has to look at an iPhone for it to run out of battery.

Soderbergh rises to his own technical challenge, his lingering ghost-POV camerawork suggesting something trapped and breathing inside the house, suffering the cruel fate of so many Hollywood ghosts: stuck watching toxic American families arguing for eternity. But that love of film-craft is not matched by David Koepp’s afterthought of a screenplay and its muddled characters, leaving the film trapped in the hinterland between arthouse experiment, mystery-thriller, family drama, horror movie and Led Zeppelin documentary.