Materializing quietly into theaters a year after its 2024 Sundance premiere, Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” marks the start of yet another prolific year for the famous multitasker with an affinity for digital cinema. But while the upcoming “Black Bag” seems poised to return Soderbergh to the more straightforward, populist side of his career—see “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Traffic,” or “Haywire”—one of the first 2024 premieres to be booted into 2025 finds the filmmaker operating in the other distinct lane of his career: that of giddy formal experimentation.

Unfortunately, as tends to be the case in this post-“retirement” era of his career, Soderbergh’s latest grasp at breaking new stylistic ground comes in the form of a film more impressed with the audacity of its own existence than pressed withmaking that existence meaningful. Though “Presence” is not one of Soderbergh’s myriad iPhone-shot recent features, the film may as well be little more...