Siri-al killer
Kimi is by no plausible yardstick a stretch for director Steven Soderbergh: the most excessively generous thing I could imagine saying about it is that, for a film which unambiguously and indeed proudly steals elements from Rear Window, The Conversation, and Blow Out, it does so very artfully, and with a good understanding of what mechanically went into those films that made them so good in the first place. It's not just a genre exercise, though it is, I am fairly confident in saying, best as a genre exercise. Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dressed up their mechanically pure thriller with some observations about culture in the 2020s and the growing omnipresence of internet-enabled stuff in our lives; they've even polished up the script to be about the emotional impact of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in so doing have produced the first work of pandemic cinema that I've seen that I thought actually worked out pretty well, though not chiefly because of its pandemic elements.
Really, the "relevant" material in Kimi never feels like it goes terribly deep; deep enough that you couldn't say it's just a superficial add-on, but never far enough that I think the film actually says anything about its topic, rather than just pointing to them and saying "hey, see that? That's totally a thing that exists". Which is fine, given that once the film starts to get cooking as a thriller, it's a tight and exhausting one. And with a blessedly short 89 minute runtime, even if say things like "and it doesn't get cooking until about halfway through", I'm not talking about a very long wait.
The film's opening scene establishes the titular Kimi: it's an Alexa-like smart device that controls everything in the household, but does it better than any device ever has. Because Kimi, you see, has actual flesh-and-blood humans overseeing its responses to requests, so they can help figure things out when users speak to Kimi using idiomatic or ambiguous language. If that sounds like the gateway to a story about the gathering and storing of private data, don't get too excited; Koepp and Soderbergh seem content to stop at "yeah, Amazon is probably recording everything you do", and then darting on to the actual story they want to tell, which is about Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), one of those people who oversees the requests. She's a perfect victim of the modern age: a mixture of agoraphobia, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder have all gathered together to make her all but literally incapable of leaving her palatial loft apartment in Seattle, and the pandemic lockdowns - starting to ramp down, at the time the film takes place - have in this sense been unusually easy for her to navigate. Don't get too excited about that, either.
What is worth getting excited about is what happens when Angela tries to make out what's going on in the messy recording of one particular Kimi operation: beneath the blaring music, she can hear what sounds very much like a woman screaming while she's being attacked. And just like Gene Hackman and John Travolta before her, she decides to see if she can't dig into that disturbing sound a bit, acting half a busybody and half an amateur sleuth.
From this moment, Kimi is both a pretty terrific thriller, good enough to mostly avoid drawing attention to how very much this is all like The Conversation, in particular, especially once the higher-ups at Amygdala (Kimi's parent company) decide that letting her go to the police with this would be much too much of an embarrassment for the company. It's basically just a '70s paranoia thriller wearing internet-of-things clothes, and let us be as clear as clear can be: there are very few working filmmakers better equipped to make a '70s paranoia thriller than Steven Soderbergh. I have my misgivings about the film's opening half, which feels to me like it's setting the stage rather too leisurely for the good of the narrative momentum, and without the social commentary that I think the filmmakers believe to be present. But it always has one ace up its sleeve: Kravitz is nothing shy of fabulous in this role. Till this point, I'd have always said that Kravitz was a perfectly reliable, unexceptional actor: a sturdy presence in roles where there was definitely room to fail, but I've never had the response, "oh yeah, she was great in that". Well, she's great in Kimi. It's mostly a physical performance, as it has to be: the majority of the film takes place in Angela's apartment, as she communicates very little except for a few video chats or text messages, and so most of how we get to know the character is through body language. And this is something Kravitz has worked out brilliantly, creating a distinct blocky walk for Angela, and a stiff way of holding her spine as she lunges at the computer. Later on, she's even worked out how and why, exactly, Angela wears a hoodie. And of course "how do you wear this outfit" is a real part of acting, and an important one, but I think it gets overlooked sometimes; Kravitz does not overlook it. Indeed, she makes it central to her portrayal of how much revulsion and fear the character feels towards the rest of the world, mixed in with defensive superiority.
Kravitz's presence holds the film together through its first half, along with Soderbergh's first cinematography in a while that's been pleasant to look at: his current phase has included films I've disliked, like Unsane, and films I've much enjoyed, like No Sudden Move, but pretty much everything he's made since un-retiring in 2017 has been unified by being fuck-ugly. Kimi isn't a beauty contest winner, but it's not ugly. The single location that dominates the early part of the film has inspired the cinematographer-director to create some clever ways of moving around the space, seeming to never repeat the same set-up, and bathing everything in a sheen of cool hues that matches the computer screen through which Angela interacts with the world. There are hardly any very wide-angle lenses to be seen, and every one that shows up serves a clear thematic or emotional purposes.
All of the film's strengths culminate and explode in the second half, which I would hardly want to spoil, except to say that among its other charms, Kimi doesn't try to bash our heads in with the world-changing stakes of the plot. The big question that arises partway through the film is whether our anxious, agoraphobic heroine will be able to cope with the possibility of going outside and traversing some six or seven blocks of downtown Seattle. This is no slight! Kimi has some stunning suspense sequences, shot close and edited with vicious tightness. It has one of the best "race to unlock the door" scenes I have seen in a very, very long time. And even when Soderbergh indulges in the filthy-looking digital images that have become his recent specialty, it works, attaching itself as it does to Angela's frantic panic at being outside, with the blocky imagery adding a sense of despair to Kravitz's frenzied speed-walking. It's exciting and fun, well worth the cost of the opening 40 minutes, and more than any other film in the director's ongoing direct-to-streaming era (this one is his third film in a row for HBO Max), this is the one I'm heartbroken not to see with a big audience.
Really, the "relevant" material in Kimi never feels like it goes terribly deep; deep enough that you couldn't say it's just a superficial add-on, but never far enough that I think the film actually says anything about its topic, rather than just pointing to them and saying "hey, see that? That's totally a thing that exists". Which is fine, given that once the film starts to get cooking as a thriller, it's a tight and exhausting one. And with a blessedly short 89 minute runtime, even if say things like "and it doesn't get cooking until about halfway through", I'm not talking about a very long wait.
The film's opening scene establishes the titular Kimi: it's an Alexa-like smart device that controls everything in the household, but does it better than any device ever has. Because Kimi, you see, has actual flesh-and-blood humans overseeing its responses to requests, so they can help figure things out when users speak to Kimi using idiomatic or ambiguous language. If that sounds like the gateway to a story about the gathering and storing of private data, don't get too excited; Koepp and Soderbergh seem content to stop at "yeah, Amazon is probably recording everything you do", and then darting on to the actual story they want to tell, which is about Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), one of those people who oversees the requests. She's a perfect victim of the modern age: a mixture of agoraphobia, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder have all gathered together to make her all but literally incapable of leaving her palatial loft apartment in Seattle, and the pandemic lockdowns - starting to ramp down, at the time the film takes place - have in this sense been unusually easy for her to navigate. Don't get too excited about that, either.
What is worth getting excited about is what happens when Angela tries to make out what's going on in the messy recording of one particular Kimi operation: beneath the blaring music, she can hear what sounds very much like a woman screaming while she's being attacked. And just like Gene Hackman and John Travolta before her, she decides to see if she can't dig into that disturbing sound a bit, acting half a busybody and half an amateur sleuth.
From this moment, Kimi is both a pretty terrific thriller, good enough to mostly avoid drawing attention to how very much this is all like The Conversation, in particular, especially once the higher-ups at Amygdala (Kimi's parent company) decide that letting her go to the police with this would be much too much of an embarrassment for the company. It's basically just a '70s paranoia thriller wearing internet-of-things clothes, and let us be as clear as clear can be: there are very few working filmmakers better equipped to make a '70s paranoia thriller than Steven Soderbergh. I have my misgivings about the film's opening half, which feels to me like it's setting the stage rather too leisurely for the good of the narrative momentum, and without the social commentary that I think the filmmakers believe to be present. But it always has one ace up its sleeve: Kravitz is nothing shy of fabulous in this role. Till this point, I'd have always said that Kravitz was a perfectly reliable, unexceptional actor: a sturdy presence in roles where there was definitely room to fail, but I've never had the response, "oh yeah, she was great in that". Well, she's great in Kimi. It's mostly a physical performance, as it has to be: the majority of the film takes place in Angela's apartment, as she communicates very little except for a few video chats or text messages, and so most of how we get to know the character is through body language. And this is something Kravitz has worked out brilliantly, creating a distinct blocky walk for Angela, and a stiff way of holding her spine as she lunges at the computer. Later on, she's even worked out how and why, exactly, Angela wears a hoodie. And of course "how do you wear this outfit" is a real part of acting, and an important one, but I think it gets overlooked sometimes; Kravitz does not overlook it. Indeed, she makes it central to her portrayal of how much revulsion and fear the character feels towards the rest of the world, mixed in with defensive superiority.
Kravitz's presence holds the film together through its first half, along with Soderbergh's first cinematography in a while that's been pleasant to look at: his current phase has included films I've disliked, like Unsane, and films I've much enjoyed, like No Sudden Move, but pretty much everything he's made since un-retiring in 2017 has been unified by being fuck-ugly. Kimi isn't a beauty contest winner, but it's not ugly. The single location that dominates the early part of the film has inspired the cinematographer-director to create some clever ways of moving around the space, seeming to never repeat the same set-up, and bathing everything in a sheen of cool hues that matches the computer screen through which Angela interacts with the world. There are hardly any very wide-angle lenses to be seen, and every one that shows up serves a clear thematic or emotional purposes.
All of the film's strengths culminate and explode in the second half, which I would hardly want to spoil, except to say that among its other charms, Kimi doesn't try to bash our heads in with the world-changing stakes of the plot. The big question that arises partway through the film is whether our anxious, agoraphobic heroine will be able to cope with the possibility of going outside and traversing some six or seven blocks of downtown Seattle. This is no slight! Kimi has some stunning suspense sequences, shot close and edited with vicious tightness. It has one of the best "race to unlock the door" scenes I have seen in a very, very long time. And even when Soderbergh indulges in the filthy-looking digital images that have become his recent specialty, it works, attaching itself as it does to Angela's frantic panic at being outside, with the blocky imagery adding a sense of despair to Kravitz's frenzied speed-walking. It's exciting and fun, well worth the cost of the opening 40 minutes, and more than any other film in the director's ongoing direct-to-streaming era (this one is his third film in a row for HBO Max), this is the one I'm heartbroken not to see with a big audience.
Categories: i think i'm paranoid, steven soderbergh, thrillers
