Movie Review - Kimi

Director: Steven Sodenbergh
Genre: Thriller/ Crime/ Drama
Runtime: 89 minutes
Year: 2022
Starring: Zoë Kravitz, Byron Bowers, Rita Wilson, Erika Christensen, Devin Ratray, India Beaufort, Derek Delgaudio, Darai Kooi, Jaime Cahill
 
Description: An agoraphobic Seattle tech (Zoë Kravitz) tech worker uncovers evidence of a crime.

Review: “Kimi” builds on older films, but is also very much or our time. In Steven Sodenbergh’s latest thriller, seventies paranoia and pandemic psychology come together in a thrilling way.
The Kimi of the title is a device that, like Siri or Alexa, respond to your voice and executes commands. However, the Kimi does not work with algorithms to improve its service, but with people. Angela is one of them: her work consists of listening to anonymous recordings where the Kimi misunderstood the customer. Then she enters some new code into the system, which prevents that particular mistake from happening again. Until one day she thinks she hears a possible murder in an audio clip.
When Angela puts on her headphones to start working, for a moment the entire soundtrack of Kimi falls silent. It is an oasis in the sound design, which on the contrary constantly emphasizes the hum of machines around us. This emphasizes the fear and mental turmoil of Angela, who even before the pandemic hardly dared to leave her apartment. Although there is no longer a lockdown in the story of “Kimi”, Angela still lives in a mental lockdown that she cannot get out of.
As a result, meeting up with the neighbor across the street for breakfast out of the house already becomes a hassle. All kinds of actions before going out the door are given extra emphasis by close-ups and the editing, up to the moment when she has to turn the key in her door. An everyday act that most of us never think about.
But for her, it’s too much of a task. As Angela slumps down in frustration at her door, Sodenbergh cuts from a close-up of the key in her hand to a shot from far above. To make palpable how small she feels at that moment, and to emphasize her isolation and physical distance from the rest of the world. Before she can recover from that, in the apartment above her, remodeling is underway with cozy pneumatic drills. So far, this is the best depiction in a movie of what lockdown might feel like for many of us.
When she does have to go outside to report a possible murder to someone at the company and call the FBI, the sound really becomes overwhelming. The image also changes and seems to race by as Angela stumbles through it. In this way you can see and hear very clearly what it feels like for Angela just to go outside.
These expressive scenes are therefore exciting in themselves, and then the tension is heightened by a literal chase through the streets of Seattle. Sodenbergh cleverly plays on modern fears surrounding privacy and surveillance, while the indebtedness to those aforementioned classic as well as “Rear Window” indicates how timeless these concerns actually are.
All of this could perhaps have been fleshed out a bit more, but there’s also a lot to be said for the length of Kimi”: Under 90 minutes. This effective thriller with bold stylistic choices is a breath of fresh air.

Rating: 3,5/ 5