Kimi Review

6/10

Steven Soderbergh is one of the most eclectic filmmakers around. His genre experiments don’t always hit the mark, but his versatility is admirable. Kimi is a decent attempt to infuse a well-worn story with modern sensibilities and tech. It has strong moments and a wonderful performance by Zoe Kravitz. She plays Angela Childs, an employee of the tech company Amygdala. This company makes a device called Kimi, an Alexa-inspired speaker that is wirelessly linked to a person’s home and their voice.

This device has a controversial human monitoring system, where employees listen to incoming audio streams to correct any issues and improve the algorithm. Angela does this job from home, which suits her lifestyle well since she is agoraphobic. Her apartment is a plush prison for her evolution. She shuts herself away from the world, mostly communicating via text and Zoom calls on her laptop. Thankfully, the film does not use Zoom calls too much. God knows we’re all a bit burnt out on those.

  She has a disconnected relationship with a man who lives in a building across from her, Terry, played by a charming Byron Bowers. She watches him come and go from work and sends him flirtatious texts. He sometimes comes over and the two have sex. He tries to convince Angela to go somewhere outside the apartment with him. Terry mentions the names of restaurants which she lashes out at instantly. He is part of her safe routine, and nothing will push her into changing that.

            There have been some attempts in previous films and TV shows to incorporate Covid into the narrative. Most of the ones I have seen did not benefit from that inclusion. If anything, trying to set a film in a Covid world has been a storytelling crutch. Kimi does an exceptional job making the world feel tangible by tying in Angela’s agoraphobia with the realities of Covid. She began developing agoraphobia after being traumatized in her past. She was starting to take steps towards bettering herself, but Covid exacerbated the issue and shut down most of her progress.

That is a genuine and emotional way to anchor the narrative in a relatable way. The scenes of Angela peering out her window at the world going by reminded me of the early days of lockdown, gazing out at people going through their everyday lives. Most of the time I would glaze over and zone out to pass the time. Every now and then I would focus on one particular window. How was this person dealing with the isolation? Do they have someone to lean on or are they solitary like me?

I used to wonder how bored the solo people were. Maybe I should have given them the thumbs up from a distance.  That is the reality Angela still goes through with her agoraphobia. The film is not specific as to what point in the pandemic the story is set. It doesn’t really need to since the days blur together during Covid. Kimi is at its best when the film has a chance to breathe and focus on Angela’s development. It captures that constant feeling of anxiety so many of us went through.

Angela becomes fixated on a crime she hears on one of the audio streams. This is where the film becomes a new interpretation of a story we have seen multiple times before. Michelangelo Antonioni did it first in 1966 with his film Blow-Up, which was about a fashion photographer who unknowingly captures a death on film. Francis Ford Coppola made my favorite version of a similar story in 1974 with The Conversation [about a surveillance expert who has a moral crisis when he thinks the couple he is spying on will be murdered. Finally, there was Brian De Palma’s Blow Out in 1981, where a movie sound recordist accidentally records a death that he suspects is murder. All those films tell variations of the same story, but they all stand out in their own ways. Each one carries an oppressive sense of dread and tension because of the mystery and ambiguity surrounding the crimes.

For the first half or so of the film, Kimi excels at creating a threatening and intriguing atmosphere. If the story managed to sustain that for the whole film, it could have stood tall with previous incarnations of this kind of story. Angela’s discovery of the crime hidden in the audio stream is effective and chilling to listen to, even though it is pretty obvious who is involved in the crime since that character was telegraphed earlier. Seeing her become fixated on the audio establishes who she is very well. She has a very strict schedule and routine she carries out from day to day. Hearing this audio completely disrupts that and forces her to adapt.

I won’t get into too many more plot details since that will get into spoiler territory. Unfortunately, the film derails once she starts to become directly involved in investigating the crime. It goes from an absorbing character study with a strong mystery element to boilerplate hero vs villains schlock. Soderbergh has made tonal changes work before. The film he shot on an iPhone, Unsane balanced a pulpy style with human drama. With Kimi, it dissolved into a typical generic Hollywood thriller by the end.

There is a difficult balance a film like this has to strike between plot and character development. Kimi shares similarities to the previous films I mentioned, but it should be reviewed for what the film is on its own terms, not for what it isn’t. By the end, it felt like a missed opportunity. It portrays a world of technology and surveillance without delving into the iffy morality and questionable ethics of this lack of privacy. It’s apathy towards the technology it shows felt too surface level. I don’t want a film to preach a heavy-handed message, but this could have done so much more with exploring the morality with Angela’s position as someone who listens to so many people’s lives.

The shift into bland action thriller is abrupt and awkward. Palpable menace and dread are thrown away in favor of one-dimensional evil-guys-committing-heinous-acts-in-public routine without any effort to hide their actions. There are moments of an unseen terror stalking her that ties into this world of never-ending surveillance. That terror doesn’t go unseen for long since we immediately see who is behind it. These are effective to an extent, but we are shown far too much of the villains. They have distinct faces we see from the get-go. Once we see who they are, there is no mystery.

The film should have taken time to paint a world where she can’t trust anybody; A foreboding encroaching force that we can’t see but is well aware of her every move. When you give a face to the unseen antagonists overseeing the main character so early in a film, you risk playing your hand too soon. That paranoia could have crept up on her, creeping its way into her home. Instead, the film turns into a by-the-numbers action thriller. One where the main character goes from being a vulnerable and relatable human with scars on her psyche to an empowered badass who fights back against the bad guys.