When I mentioned to a couple of different friends that Steven Soderbergh directed a ghost movie currently playing in theaters, they both said, “I thought he retired.”
They haven’t been keeping up. Soderbergh has retired from filmmaking two or three times, yes — but not lately. Since his three-year hiatus ending in 2016, he’s wheeled through a few different genres: the heist comedy Logan Lucky (2017); the sports drama High Flying Bird (2019); the comedy-dramas The Laundromat (2019), Let Them All Talk (2020), and Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023); and the thrillers Unsane (2018), No Sudden Move (2021), and Kimi (2022). He’s also got another coming out in March of this year, a darkly romantic spy film starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender called Black Bag. Busy man.
But still, a ghost movie seems like a surprising project for Soderbergh, who, when he’s not in all-out popular mode with the Ocean’s and Magic Mike franchises or crowd-pleasers like Erin Brockovich, has a slightly chilly, cerebral quality. It’s made him a favorite with critics and an unlikely director to get invested in the often-sneered-at category of the supernatural. Even more surprising is reading about Soderbergh’s own belief in ghosts, and the paranormal experience that inspired Soderbergh to make this film:
We had a house sitter, and she described seeing someone at the end of the hallway crossing from the bathroom to the bedroom while she was watching TV in this sort of parlor area. And she immediately called out without thinking, “Jules!” [Soderbergh’s wife, Jules Asner] and then realized, “Jules isn’t here. That’s why I’m house sitting. . . .” What we discovered was someone had died in our house, and there were questions about the circumstances of this person’s death, and some of our neighbors speculated that, even though the police had ruled it a suicide, that it was not a suicide. And so our theory became that it was that…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
