Steven Soderbergh Double-bill

Notes on two recent Steven Soderbergh films:

Presence (2024)

Black Bag (2025)

Very few directors can boast the career arc of Steven Soderbergh. His feature debut film is the stuff of Cinematic dreams. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, won the audience award and then went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Winning the Palme d’Or at the first time of asking and at the age of 26 is an incredible feat, especially for an independent film. Soderbergh then made the jump to commercial cinema yet still finding a way to incorporate artistic indie film elements. Films such as Out of Sight (1998), Ocean’s Eleven, (2001) have a cool seductive feel and it is safe to say that in the hands of another director would have turned into mindless action films. Soderbergh directed many notable films such as Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2000), Che (2008), Contagion (2011). That is why his 2011 announcement that he would retire from filmmaking was a shock. Later on, as more details emerged, he expressed his reasons related for that retirement and his return to filmmaking with a new distribution model. He has certainly re-emerged with a new prolific creativity that has filtered into both films and TV series. Case in point, his recent double: Presence (2024) and Black Bag (2025).

Both Presence and Black Bag refine genre (horror and spy thriller respectively) through an independent film’s sensibilities such as singular location and limited cast. The end result are highly creative engaging films.

The idea behind Presence is electric: a horror film where the entire perspective is seen via the eyes of the spirit with the camera doubling as the spirit’s eyes. The hovering camera is a technical joy to behold and also lends a levity to the film as the camera floats from room to room. There are no conventional jump scares in the film but still some hair-raising moments. Due to the spirit’s POV, the entire film is confined to the house the spirit occupies. The confined house location along with a very tight script and running time of just 84 minutes ensures the film is engaging from start to finish.

Black Bag is equally efficient with his running time of 93 minutes and film is bookended with scenes in a house’s dining room. These dining room scenes feature smart probing dialogues laced with alcohol or drugs (at film’s start) which ensure brutal honest jabs. The camera does leave the house and follows the characters to their place of work and outdoor locations to show agents at work in the field or making deals/exchanging information. A spy thriller wouldn’t be complete without blood, explosions and backstabbing, all three of which are present in the film but in unconventional forms. The film’s lighting and cinematography is more akin to a small indie film and add to the film’s atmosphere. Black Bag looks and feels like an indie spy thriller but one that features Hollywood recognizable stars.

It is safe to say that Soderbergh wouldn’t have been able to make films such as Presence and Black Bag prior to his retirement. However, since Logan Lucky (2017), Soderbergh has been releasing such creative films. Presence and Black Bag form a nice trilogy along with 2022’s Kimi as Soderberg worked with writer David Koepp on all 3. Soderberg and Koepp have certainly formed a nice combination and it will be interesting to see if the two combine for more films.