‘Kimi’ is a pandemic-era thriller that feels hauntingly prescient in today’s world

Countless thrillers have featured women who lock themselves away in their homes, only to discover that the world within is even scarier than the one outside.

Not all of them are hits; for every Repulsion or Wait Until Dark from the 1960s, there’s a flop like last year’s overblown Hitchcock pastiche “The Woman in the Window.”

Kimi, a riveting new film about a shut-in, is a clever little addition to the shut-in canon. It’s a stylish, low-budget genre exercise that’s eerily dialed into our contemporary era, like a lot of Steven Soderbergh‘s recent output.

 

The film is set in the middle of the epidemic and follows Angela, a 30-year-old woman played by Zoe Kravitz. She works for a huge Seattle tech company that makes Kimi, a virtual house assistant similar to Siri or Alexa that dims your lights, plays your music, and patiently tries to answer all of your questions.

 

Angela has her own Kimi, which is useful since she seldom leaves her big loft apartment. She’s agoraphobic, and after years of controlling her anxiety, she lost control during COVID lockdown.

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Angela’s mission is to make Kimi smarter and easier to use. She listens to audio transmissions from customers whose requests Kimi doesn’t comprehend, then develops code to resolve the problem. Kimi must have somehow taped a violent crime in progress when she hears a distressing footage of a lady screaming one day.

When Angela tries to inform the corporation of her findings, she is given the runaround and advised to forget about it. Things get ugly when she doesn’t and starts discovering more about the victim, who appears to have been brutally murdered.

 

It’s fun to see Angela transform into a digital detective; Soderbergh is the kind of filmmaker who can elicit suspense from scenes of typing fingers and blinking cursors. Angela is eventually summoned to the office to meet with a company official, thereby compelling her to leave her flat for the first time in months.

 

Kimi is structured by Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp as a cunning 21st-century take on classic 1970s paranoia thrillers. Angela is both surveilling and being surveilled, which is reminiscent of The Conversation, and the evil corporate plot she uncovers is reminiscent of The Parallax View. Of all, in a world when anyone with a smartphone knows they’re being watched, paranoia isn’t an inappropriate reaction.

 

Kimi compresses a lot of concepts concerning the pervasiveness of digital technologies into a brisk 89-minute running time, especially at a time when COVID has made us more reliant on them than ever. From the outside chase sequences filmed over downtown Seattle to the squirmingly tense Panic Room ending, the film works like a gangbuster as a pure thriller.

 

It wouldn’t work nearly as effectively without Kravitz, who plays a charming protagonist who isn’t interested in being likable in the first place. Angela’s fear elicits sympathy, while her perseverance and inventiveness elicit admiration. But, in a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, she can be impatient and dismissive of the people in her life, whether it’s her mother, with whom she clashes over FaceTime, or her love interest, who lives in the apartment across the street.

 

In other words, while most viewers may not experience Angela’s agoraphobia, many of us can relate to her worries of leaving the house after months of solitude. That’s why, when she eventually musters the resolve to leave home, it’s both terrifying and moving. To emphasize Angela’s bewilderment, Soderbergh, who shot and edited the picture, used tilted camera angles and noisy city noises. Angela adjusts as the story progresses, and Kimi becomes a story of reconnection with the world. Although the outside world is a large, terrifying place, it isn’t inherently scarier than what happens inside, where someone is always looking — or listening.