A COVID-19 quarantine thriller from director Steven Soderbergh, who’s working from a script by David Koepp, Kimi gets its title from the Alexa/Siri/Google Home-type device that jump-starts the action (and ominously responds to prompts with a cheery “I’m here.”) An agoraphobic data analyst named Angela (Zoe Kravitz), who is just beginning to adjust to life out of lockdown, comes across alarming audio while monitoring Kimi devices; when she sends her concern up the corporate flagpole, she’s met with indifference and eventually threats of violence. Koepp’s fairly straightforward screenplay doesn’t take us in many surprising directions, so the film’s pleasures lie in Kravitz’s jittery performance (she’s working in a similar vein to Claire Foy in Soderbergh’s other recent psychological thriller, Unsane) and the experimental filmmaking that’s usually going on in the corners of a Soderbergh production. Here, it’s his editing that stands out—especially in a sequence of Angela filtering the audio, where the filleting of techy insert shots and close-ups of Kravitz (all amplified by the layered sound design) recall similar sequences in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Of course that movie challenged the assumptions of both its characters and the audience in provocative ways, offering a level of sophistication that Kimi never nears.
(2/16/2022)
