The premise of Stephen Soderbergh's Kimi is fairly straightforward. It is, essentially, a psychological crime thriller. Less Zodiac and more Rear Window.
The film stars Zoë Kravitz (Fantastic Beasts, The Batman) as Angela Childs, a tech worker with agoraphobia who discovers audio-recorded evidence of a violent crime in the course of her job of fixing bugs in a 'smart speaker' called Kimi. When she tries to report what she heard, she is met with resistance from her boss. (Surprise, surprise).
Unable to let it go, Angela has to confront her deepest fear – leaving her apartment. On the face of it, this seems like it plays into the fears we're all living with: what viral dangers await outside our doorstep?
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We see Angela go through her routine – disinfectant wipes, face mask, a bottle of hand sanitiser – all little things we have become accustomed to working into our daily routines, to a greater or lesser extent. How much they hold us back, rationally or irrationally, is up to the individual.
For Angela, the pandemic retriggered a previous bout of agoraphobia – something that makes perfect sense. It's easy to empathise with her, even as life outside returns to a new normal, she is stuck.
But the film isn't actually about the pandemic – or perhaps it's more accurate to say it isn't only about the pandemic. It's about tech.
Kimi, the fictional version of something like Siri or Alexa, listens – always, it seems. This pervasiveness of her presence is, depending on which way you look at it, a good thing or a bad thing.
That Soderbergh accomplishes a malleability of point of view despite the myopic focus from its lead is a feat in and of itself, helped by the exquisite cinematography. The camera work does more to illustrate Angela's emotional and mental state than the dialogue – a nifty feat when so much of the language we use today is bloated by slick social-media-fied faux psychoanalysis.
Kravitz plays Angela with a realistic and appreciable, tangible kind of fear. Yes she has taken her anxiety to an extreme, but that core centre of what it means to feel like your life is out of your control is something we can all relate to.
Angela isn't a caricature of what that means – a la Amy Adams' character in Woman in the Window; she's real and full of dimension. She feels, and behaves, like us, like any one of our friends or family members, like people we know and love.
The cast is rounded out by familiar faces that make you sit up and do that Leonardo DiCaprio meme. From (most notably for your Gilmore Girls obsessed writer) Emily Kuroda as Angela's psychotherapist Dr Sarah Bruns and Jaime Camil (the loveable Rogelio de la Vega from Jane The Virgin) to Erika Christensen (Parenthood) and Byron Bowers, each peripheral is memorable and distinct and make up the background mosaic against which Angela exists, giving dimension and a real-world vibrancy to the movie.
This feels like a departure from other agoraphobia-centred thrillers, where the cast is so pared back that everyone who appears is a suspect – and while this has its merits, for Kimi the fact that her world is bigger than her apartment despite her never leaving makes sense, because it's the way the world works now.
We all live lives beyond the walls of our apartments, and this was only heightened by the pandemic. Kimi makes use of tech in a more realistic way – glitching FaceTime calls rather than seamless superimposed videos – favouring the grittiness of reality over the shellac we all tend to paint over our lives.
Visually, Kimi is engrossing and fresh. Narratively, it is compelling without being confusing. Its performances are controlled but highly emotive. In these ways, Soderbergh has made a film that truly feels unique even within the bounds of its genre, pushing them just enough.
KIMI is out now in the UK on Sky Cinema and on HBO Max in the US.
Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance film critic and journalist, with a focus on J-drama & film, and the Japanese production industry. She was previously Locations Editor at Screen International and Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. Her writing can also befound in Curzon, 1883, and more. A born and raised New Yorker, she loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
