Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kimi’ on HBO Max, a Crisp Steven Soderbergh Thriller Starring Zoe Kravitz as a Tech Wiz on the Run

Hey, remember about a decade ago when Steven Soderbergh was going to “retire” from directing movies? We now may laugh – go ahead: Ha! Ha ha! – at such a silly notion, as HBO Max exclusive Kimi is his seventh film in six years. His diversity as a visual storyteller is nearly unparalleled (Spielberg may be the only similarly prolific director with broader range), as he follows up a goofball lark (Logan Lucky) with an iPhone-shot actioner (Unsane) with a behind-the-sports drama (High Flying Bird) with a political outrage comedy (The Laundromat) with an improv chatfest (Let Them All Talk) with a period noir (No Sudden Move) with Kimi, a concise, linear-for-Soderbergh neo-tech-thriller starring Zoe Kravitz. And all this gets one wondering if Soderbergh has ever truly made a movie that isn’t worth watching at least once.

KIMI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Angela Childs’ (Kravitz) Seattle loft apartment is meticulous. She’s very particular about her pillows. She tightens her bedcovers with military rigor. She stationary-cycles rigorously and showers almost as rigorously afterward, scrubbing a little harder than you or I probably would. She brushes her teeth and takes her pills and has a whole routine and you get the sense that she never, ever deviates from it. She habitually hits the sanitizer pump and waggles her hands like a baby seal might, drying them off. She looks out her Rear Window window and eyeballs some of the neighbors through their undraperied windows, and texts her across-the-way friend Terry (Byron Bowers). They agree to meet at the food truck for some breakfast and she gets ready and puts on her COVID mask and unlocks one lock and the second one but pauses on the third one – and has an anxiety attack. She calms herself, walks to the window and watches as Terry realizes he’s being stood up.

Then Angela sits down at her computer to work, resolving communication errors for a smart speaker branded Kimi, created by an Amazonian corp dubbed Amygdala. Her title is kind of silly: voice stream interpreter. You know, when a consumer asks Kimi to order more “kitchen paper” and Kimi doesn’t understand it, it’s Angela’s job to tell the algorithm that “kitchen paper” is the same as “paper towels.” You won’t be surprised to learn that Angela is remarkably efficient at her job. She will resolve all errors in her queue. Even the one that seems like a simple mistaken activation of the speaker, one that another tech might dismiss without much thought. But Angela? To her ear, there’s something going on. So she gets out her audio gear and plugs in some cables and fiddles some knobs and isolates the sounds and hears something disturbing: An angry voice. Cursing. The clamor of violence.

She has to do something about it. She video chats with a Romanian hacker pal (Alex Dobrenko) for some tech advice. She facetimes her mother (Robin Givens) so we can get a little backstory. She calls her landlord to remind him that the noisy renovations upstairs need to cease during specific hours, per their previous agreement. She video chats with her dentist about her throbbing toothache. She calls Terry over; he understands her agoraphobia, but maybe not her cold and abrupt post-coitus dismissal of him, as she changes the sheets while he’s still lying on the bed. She abruptly disconnects from a video chat with her therapist, who wants to talk more about that incident. She eventually absolutely must leave the house to deal with the troubling audio files, which is almost certainly connected to the shady shit we saw the Amygdala CEO (Derek Delgaudio) doing in the movie’s opening scene. Uh oh? Yes, uh oh.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Hitchcock is a clear reference point here, from the apartment-on-high views of Rear Window to the psychological angles of Shadow of a Doubt and Spellbound.

Performance Worth Watching: Kravitz gamely embraces Angela’s complexities: She’s a flawed protagonist, someone who’s surely aware that she needs to work on herself – she can be rude, abrupt and self-involved, and although there’s good reason for that, she’s precariously close to being unlikable. Credit Kravitz for maintaining our sympathies for the character, who’s admirable in her ability to think fast and use her intelligence in the face of her crippling anxieties.

Memorable Dialogue: Kimi’s cool, femme-robotic mantra: “I’m here.”

Sex and Skin: Topless Kravitz; moaning and whatnot as we see her in closeup, face down on the mattress.

Our Take: Kimi is a functionally taut, straightforward genre thriller, albeit with more nuance than we might expect from such things. It’s a character study of sorts, with Kravitz establishing Angela within a highly suspenseful situation that adroitly addresses modern sexual dynamics, the realities of pandemic-era mental health struggles, the politics of authority and the myriad pros and cons of technological omnipresence. One takeaway is, if everyone was as computer-savvy as Angela, we’d be less susceptible to those cons – and in that sense, it’s a horror story without blood or boogeymen.

But there’s a lot more to Kimi than that. The film is set in a city where citizens protest shabby treatment of the homeless population, an age where big-tech corporate bureaucrats exert control and a current moment where distrust of law enforcement has rarely been greater, where the push against patriarchal rule has never been stronger. There’s a three-second pause in the action in which Angela, a Black woman on the run and in danger, stops as she passes two white male cops on the street, then chooses to keep moving. It’s not a throwaway moment or a plot hole, but an acknowledgment of the dynamics of power here in 2022. The movie only gives us a vague idea of what Angela has been through, but it traumatized her, and watching her dig deep and do what she must is inspiring without being overly manipulative.

Soderbergh directs the film with a less-showy method than we might expect from him, but one that fits snugly with the narrative’s careful observations and streamlined plot. Not that it lacks his stylistic touch; it still bears the filmmaker’s stamp, from a virtuoso establishing shot of Angela’s apartment to Cliff Martinez’s contrapuntal score, which mellows as action intensifies. Watching Soderbergh use such precision and economy is invigorating, even when the plot deviates from plausibility in the third act. It’s not airtight, but it’s gut-level satisfying and provocative – and even though those final moments don’t fit snugly with the fastidious visual storytelling that came before it, the movie nevertheless works.

Our Call: Kimi keenly balances its base thrills with thoughtful subject matter, its pragmatism with art. In other words, it’s a true Soderbergh work. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.