The blowout success of 1999s The Blair Witch Project really did a number on the horror genre. It wasnt the first faux-found-footage movie, or even the first found-footage horror movie. But it landed during a period where handheld cameras were increasingly small and cheap, horror was becoming more popular and mainstream, and internet-based marketing let the creators target their ideal audience, effectively turning their film into viral creepypasta.Between its massive box-office success and the seeming ease of duplicating it cheaply, The Blair Witch Project launched a fad for found-footage horror that peaked and ebbed over the course of decades, and still occasionally resurfaces in projects like 2023s underground sensation Skinamarink. In Steven Soderberghs hypnotic, minimalist ghost story Presence, though, the found-footage movie style may have found its final form.Presence centers on a haunting in a luxuriously modernized century-old home, newly occupied by a troubled family full of fault lines. Waifish teen daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is reeling after the death of her best friend. Her smug, arrogant older brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) is unsympathetic; the family has just moved entirely so he can get into a better school district, where his swim-team stardom might take him further. Their parents, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) are at odds about everything, particularly how to deal with Chloes depression and possible substance abuse, and how to moderate Rebekahs clear and absolute favoritism for Tyler. As they all navigate their own emotional trials, an invisible, intangible presence represented by the camera stalks through the house, observing them all even in their most private moments.Technically speaking, Presence isnt really a found-footage movie in the Blair Witch Project vein. Theres no pretense that Soderberghs first-person narrative is actual camera footage, let alone lost camera footage unearthed sometime after the camera operator met a terrible fate. But everything about the movie plays within the visual style that came to be broadly known as found-footage horror: The audience sees the entire movie through Soderberghs lens, representing the one witness that connects all the narrative threads.In this case, though, the camera isnt a jumpy, queasy handheld device, as in The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, or Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. It isnt a series of sources like security systems or static cameras, as in [REC] or Paranormal Activity. Its a warmly lit, crisply realized eye moving through the story, gliding around the house and the new inhabitants with inhuman smoothness that gets across the alienness of the entity. Presences entire premise is that the story is framed by a ghostly voyeur hovering over the cast, taking in their needs and fears, but initially unable to communicate its own.Soderberghs approach taps into the found-footage horror idea of a story being experienced by whoevers behind the camera, except in this case, the question of whos behind the camera is part of the horror. From the start, Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (who also wrote Soderberghs simple, efficient 2022 action-thriller Kimi) imply that the presence is a ghost but until the action fully plays out, the audience is left to wonder whether its something else entirely, along with what it wants and how and whether it will eventually make its needs known. The filmmakers inevitably build in a few small jump scares, but for the most part, Presence is about low-key, slow-burn curiosity rather than lurking terror.For audiences expecting breathless tricks out of the usual found-footage horror playbook the kinds of barely glimpsed threats and dimly lit shocks a fast-moving, low-fidelity camera enables Soderberghs approach may seem perverse. The houses bright, open airiness and richly appointed rooms make it seem like an unlikely and even ill-suited space for a haunting. Theres no chance the camera will ever abruptly capture some unexpected, horrifying specter, because the camera is the specter.Where another story might have made the ghosts looming presence and intimate proximity to the characters into a constant eerie threat, Presences ghost seems benign, even distanced. Like the lonely, faceless ghost in David Lowerys A Ghost Story, it seemseither incapable of affecting the family, or uninterested. Until it isnt.But the uniqueness of that approach is part of the appeal. Presence is more intellectual than visceral, more engaged with raising questions than pinning viewers to their seats. Which makes it feel like a more grown-up take on the found-footage movie. If The Blair Witch represented the subgenres wiry adolescence, then format extensions like Unfriended and similar screenlife horror movies were its experimental young adulthood, and Presence is its full adult form.In growing up, though, the genre has lost a lot of its startling, engaging rawness and vrit energy. Presence is more sedate, sophisticated, and polished than its found-footage predecessors, but its also less emotionally engaging, in spite of its committed performances and the raw, aching feelings of grief, anger, resentment, and loneliness the central family is navigating. Bringing their story in at a slim 85 minutes, Soderbergh and Koepp dont give the premise or the format enough time to get predictable, but they also only rarely give their story a sense of urgency or excitement. Its found-footage horror as an intellectual exercise rather than a heart-racing emotional one.All of which suggests Presence is just one more in Soderberghs endless line of cinematic experiments with form than it is a fad-launching phenomenon in the vein of The Blair Witch Project. This is one end stage for a still-evolving subgenre, not the beginning of a new one. For Soderbergh, whos always been interested in innovating and pushing movies to the next stage, then moving on, thats probably enough. For deep-in-the-weeds horror fans expecting a more familiar brand of scares, though, Presence may feel like an odd iteration on a familiar trope something that feels more grown-up and more singular than all those increasingly samey racing-around-with-a-camera horror movies of decades past, but still not quite as much fun.Presence is in theaters now.