Kimi - Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

STEVEN Soderbergh updates Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the tech age in Kimi, a smart and tense thriller starring Zoe Kravitz.

The Kimi of the film’s title refers to a new piece of home tech designed to be more advanced than Amazon’s Alexa or Echo, in that it relies more on people than algorithms to become more effective and less prone to miscommunication.

But given the tech is still in its infancy and dependent on financial backers (a scenario established in the film’s initial, establishing scene), it’s fairly inevitable that the company behind it is liable to mar some morally dubious choices to get it.

Enter Kravitz’s agoraphobic Angela, a home-bound data expert, struggling with life in the wake of Covid, who comes to suspect she has heard something sinister (involving sexual assault and possibly even murder) on a flagged Kimi stream.

While initial attempts to report it via ‘safe’ means are largely treated with scepticism, Angela resolves to overcome her self-imposed quarantine at home to venture back into turn world in an attempt to alert the FBI, unaware that her actions threaten to uncover a wider conspiracy and cover-up involving her company.

Working from a script by David Koepp, who also penned Panic Room (a film that Soderbergh has confessed to viewing twice through lockdown), Soderbergh manages to turn his film into a tense survival thriller as well as a sly nod to state of the world concerns surrounding big business practices, privacy in the tech era and life in a post-Covid world.

What makes the subsequent movie all the more impressive is the intelligence he brings to these subjects, steadfastly refusing to make anything too gimmicky or over-wrought.

His treatment of Angela’s agoraphobia and its incumbent anxieties is fairly accurate and sensitive, heightening the film’s credibility on a human level, and making her subsequent journey all the more empowering as a result. If a final scene does feel a little optimistic and Hollywood in that regard, then it can just about be forgiven.

But Kravitz deserves credit, too, for imbuing her character with such a believability, allowing her character’s emotions and physical traits to feel organic rather than staged.

When it comes to the tech elements, Koepp and Soderbergh also create a believable next step scenario for the Alexa age, which affords them the chance to question corporate responsibility and morality in the modern age, while drawing on past conspiracy thrillers such as Three Days of the Condor and Michael Clayton (the latter, especially, for how easily executed a staged murder can be performed) for maximum audience investment.

For while Kimi undoubtedly has social commentary in mind, it is also first and foremost a thriller that knows that it needs to entertain.

And here’s where Soderbergh also has some fun, subverting some of Rear Window’s classic elements (and not merely updating them for the modern age). Extracting Angela from her self-imposed exile into the wider world allows for some sleight of hand disorientation techniques designed to highlight the challenges Angela must face, while simultaneously opening up the latter part of the film into chase movie territory.

Hence, when Angela finds her formerly safe zone (home) encroached upon by her pursuers, it’s immense fun to watch as she turns the tables on them (complete with a little help from Kimi).

Soderbergh has therefore succeeded in creating a highly effective, and extremely efficient (given its tight 89min running time), post-Hitchcockian thriller that entertains and provides food for thought - just as he did with similarly eye-catching films such as Contagion, Side Effects and Traffic.