“Presence” is, in many ways, a rather conventional haunted house movie. We have an all-American family with an unstable dynamic, a seemingly ideal home, and a spirit that vies to resist what it sees as an egregious intrusion with eerie poltergeist antics. Add in a shaky-voiced medium who tries in vain to warn said family of impending doom, and one might be rather disappointed at the amount of tropes the film’s creators make no attempt to move away from and/or subvert.

As is usually the case with director Steven Soderbergh, however, the main appeal of “Presence” is not its story-related conventions (which is more on the shoulders of David Koepp, its screenwriter), but a particular technical innovation that helps lift it a shade or two higher than what the haunted house genre normally offers.

The camera, in “Presence”, takes on the point-of-view of its titular poltergeist, and while its identity becomes something of an open question as the film progresses, it’s unmistakable that Soderbergh’s choice to frame the perspective in such a way dynamically draws the viewer into the story; creating, even, a relationship between the spirit’s POV and the audience’s POV that is subject to a level of exploration (and, indeed, subversion) that perhaps a more traditional format would miss.