"Kimi" review — Soderbergh's tense pandemic-set thriller
“I’m here!”
Despite several major hits under his belt and frequent collaborations with some of contemporary cinema’s best and brightest performers, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, best known for films like Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Magic Mike (2012), always feels like an underdog. His films, especially his five most recent ones, are often unceremoniously released onto streaming without much fan fair despite positive critical reception and featuring performances from the likes of Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, John Hamm, André Holland, and Jon Hamm. Yet Soderbergh cannot be stopped. Having released five feature films in the past three years, three of which were during the pandemic, it seems like the Soderbergh production stream has no end. With Kimi, his latest project, Soderbergh finally takes the pandemic head-on with his specifically strange and distinctive filmmaking sensibilities that define him as one of the most interesting filmmakers of the present day.
Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) works as a technician for Kimi devise, an Alexa-like assistant technology, addressing miscommunications between users and the software. “Kimi understands you better than it did yesterday because of our people,” the company’s CEO Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio) says in a Zoom interview. But one of those miscommunications contains the traces of a horrific crime sending Angela on a collision course with the power of her corporate overlords and her emotional baggage. Kimi keeps things wonderfully simple with a straightforward premise and a relevant story that reveals anxieties about the pandemic and our ever-digitized lives.
Kimi is an agoraphobic, paranoid surveillance thriller. It takes after Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), but with a deeply contemporary perspective. The paranoia circles around the effects of digital technology on our lives, purposefully or not. Whether consciously or not, it’s about the influences of corporations on the justice system and the terrifying power they possess. Rear Window’s lively apartment complex is replaced with two sombre, adjacent apartment buildings in Seattle. The far-off sound recordings of The Conversation and Blow Out are replaced by a miscommunication with a robot. De Palma’s off-kilter is channelled through the chaotic, disorienting camera work of Angela desperately pushing through a corporate office building. While he lives and breathes his influences, Soderberg is not interested in simply recreating the work of the past. It’s been forty years since Blow Out was released: it’s time for an update.
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| Zoë Kravitz in Kimi. © Warner Bros. |
COVID has become taboo in current filmmaking. Low-key two-hander films created during lockdown hardly address the circumstances of their creation. Films shot after the change in restriction make sure to avoid the appearances of masks or other covid-related items in the film. While this is understandable, it is still surprising to see such a widespread avoidance of the topic. Perhaps it is born out of a fear of being insensitive (see the atrocious Songbird (2020) as a particularly noxious example) or reminding the audience too much of the present. Kimi doesn’t let you forget that what you’re watching is set in the here-and-now. After Hasling steps away from the aforementioned Zoom call, a wide shot informs us that his put-together bookcase background is constructed in his garage lit by a ring light. Below a nicely pressed shirt and blazer, he only wears his boxers. However, Soderbergh uses the pandemic to great effect in his film, using it as a tool to exaggerate Angela’s problems and struggles.
Kravitz, who is also to star in Matt Reeves’ The Batman which opens next month, is excellent here as Angela. Suffering from severe trauma and agoraphobia, Angela’s terror of the world outside her apartment — demonstrated in a shift from tripod-mounted camera work inside the apartment to handheld, shaky-cam outside — is all the more relatable and understandable through a pandemic lens. She confines herself to her home, with the slightest thought of going outside being nearly unbearable. But having uncovered a potential murder, she is forced to confront the hell of the outside.
This isn’t Soderbergh’s first use of a pandemic in his filmography most famously tackling a hypothetical one in his film Contagion (2011), which became extremely popular in the early days of the pandemic. While Contagion uses a sociological approach to talking about disease and takes a broad approach to the subject, Soderbergh limits himself here to one woman. His limited perspective and dedication to the present-day become an occasional stumbling block for the film. Kimi is a film that will struggle to stay beyond the time of its initial release. The limited scale makes the film feel unfortunately insignificant at times. The film plays too heavily into its primary location without the constant charm of a film like Rear Window. Its Zoom-screen supporting characters have a hard time leaving an impression confined to Angela’s computer screen.
For now, Kimi is a fairly strong, intriguing thriller for the pandemic age. It strikes an interesting balance and contrast between its COVID story and its many varied influences. While it struggles to gain its footing — especially in the first half — Kimi proves that Soderbergh is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. While relatively contained and small scale, the film is ambitious in its themes and storytelling as Soderbergh tries to reconcile a new reality in the world of filmmaking. For the most part, it works quite well. While the film’s future legacy could be in question, at present, Kimi is a film for our moment.
Score: 3.5
Kimi is now streaming on HBO Max.
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