Paranoia has come a long way since the analog age. Gene Hackman’s professional snoop in The Conversation methodically destroyed his entire apartment searching for a bug he believed had been planted there. Nowadays, we purchase the listening and tracking devices ourselves, in the form of virtual assistants and GPS-equipped smartphones.
While most of us have made our peace with trading some degree of privacy for convenience, those curious about a worst-case scenario—or just seeking some enjoyably implausible excitement—should look no further than Kimi, a new tech-heavy thriller written by David Koepp (very much in his Panic Room mode) and directed by Steven Soderbergh (returning to Unsane territory, minus the fisheye lenses). When this film is over, viewers with voice-activated smart TVs are liable to look around for the long-dormant physical remote.
It’s not as if Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) doesn’t understand exactly how much information these devices vacuum up. A former Facebook content moderator, Angela now works as a “voicestream interpreter” for fictional Amygdala (cutely named after the part of the brain responsible for threat assessment), responding to issues with commands given to an Alexa-style assistant called Kimi. “I’m here!” chirps Kimi (in the voice of Betsy Brantley, Soderbergh’s ex-wife) when summoned, and there’s a very relatable running joke in which it constantly responds, unwanted, to casual mentions of its name during FaceTime conversations. Things get considerably less amusing, however, when one of the streams sent to Angela for analysis turns out to be a snatch of loud music (Massive Attack’s “Inertia Creeps,” another nice touch) beneath which a woman’s scream can be faintly heard.
Apart from a quick prologue, Kimi’s entire first half is set inside Angela’s cavernous fourth-floor Seattle apartment, from which she’s been working for some time—partly due to the pandemic, perhaps (brace yourself for masks), but mostly because she’s become agoraphobic after having been sexually assaulted. During the initial lockdown, she developed a flirtation with across-the-street neighbor Terry (Byron Bowers), but can’t even bring herself to meet him at the taco truck a few feet below.
Soderbergh responds to this challenge (itself likely pandemic-related) with cinema’s umpteenth homage to Rear Window, observing Angela monitor Terry from a distance even as another neighbor (Devin Ratray) constantly watches her. The sensation of déjà vu is compounded by Angela’s efforts to extract clearer audio from the recording and determine whether she’s hearing what she thinks she’s hearing, à la John Travolta in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (which was already a riff on Antonioni’s Blow-Up).
Eventually, however, circumstances force Angela to steel herself and venture outside, at which point Kimi finally kicks into high gear. Soderbergh suggests her off-the-charts anxiety with disorienting angles and cacophonous sound design; unlike the distorted lens he used throughout No Sudden Move, these deliberately jarring formal choices serve a clear purpose (and disappear once no longer needed). The evil corporate conspiracy she’s inadvertently uncovered—thereby making her the target of paid assassins (who at one point attempt to abduct her on the street in broad daylight, right beside a huge crowd of protesters)—is way over the top. But Koepp finds some genuinely chilling notes in the margins. “We take this very seriously,” Amygdala employees keep telling Angela as she reports her concern; the more they repeat it, unprompted, the less reassuring it sounds. And while the film doesn’t draw our attention to the company’s internal data, sharp-eyed viewers will catch the user screen that includes three separate tiers of “purchase interest” (mild, actionable, intense) for items that people have mentioned in Kimi’s earshot.
Still, Kimi isn’t entirely a dystopian cautionary tale. Part of what makes the film’s first half comparatively bland is that Koepp uses that time to plant a bunch of seemingly ordinary and innocuous details that’ll pay off in the home stretch. Without revealing too much, let’s just note for the record that there are circumstances in which it might be quite useful to perform certain actions via voice commands. One moment in particular makes the film’s exclusive presence on HBO Max seem like a shame, as it’s fun to imagine audiences (or at least an audience of a certain age) cheering in response. For all of its legitimate concerns about erosion of privacy in the digital age, Kimi is in many respects no less silly and conspiracy-friendly than Moonfall, imagining Jeff Bezos as Big Brother and Amazon’s entire staff as the Thought Police. For those who prefer clever plotting to F/X spectacle, however, it’s a whole lot easier to swallow.