KIMI (2022)

Years ago, I received an Amazon Echo Dot as a gift. I didn’t—and still don’t—have an Alexa because the notion of a perpetually-listening device bothers me. It goes without saying, then, that I have never opened the Dot’s box. 

It also goes without saying, then, that I would be drawn to KIMI, the Steven Soderbergh film released exclusively on HBO Max earlier this year. In the film, Angela (Zoë Kravitz) works for the Amygdala corporation, listening to recordings from their Alexa-like Kimi device and fixing errors. Angela works remotely in post-pandemic Seattle because she suffers from agoraphobia but, when Angela overhears an apparent murder by two contract killers on a Kimi, she must venture outside her apartment to report the crime she heard through her company. But escaping that journey unscathed becomes a challenge in itself because what she overheard was not just any crime.

If that premise sounds both a bit pulpy and of-the-moment, you would be correct. KIMI taps into the very fear that leaves me leery of Alexa; that someone might be listening is disconcerting. But there’s more paranoia-stoking tech tricks in here than just an eavesdropping speaker. There are creepy powerful hackers, devices activated and tracked from other continents, and deep profiles of users at the fingertips of the bad guys. If you get the willies when your phone pops up an ad for something you were just talking about, expect some shivers. 

But KIMI is not some Black Mirror-esque cautionary tale. This is a rush of adrenaline that looks and plays slick and had me screaming and cheering at the TV throughout its second half. There are moments that evoke great sci-fi cinema, but also some extended set pieces that conjure far lighter films with names I’ll omit to avoid spoilers. (You’ll know one when you see it.)

The sum of these intriguing parts fails without a dynamic human center, though, which Kravitz ensures is never in question. In the first half, we get a portrait of a brilliant but trapped woman. She bounces between work, calls from her concerned mother, and therapy appointments via Zoom. Saving the whys for later, we focus on how her agoraphobia stifles her: she makes and breaks plans with a man across the street (Byron Bowers), she refuses medical attention for a painful abscessed tooth, and she disappoints her support system (as well as herself) over and over again. Angela is never weak but we can see she feels weak, ready to move on but unable to make that move. Kravitz captures all of that with a palette of wistful intensity from an expressive face. 

When Angela is thrust into the world, though, Kravitz’s performance elevates even higher. She captures a walking manner I know well while fully masked with her eyes forward and shoulders made as narrow as possible while taking short quick steps. Angela embodies that post-COVID discomfort with other people and a world of invisible assailants perfectly. But then, while later on the run, Kravitz also hits the right notes for that same fearful person forced to flee with kinetic flailing and stumbling leaps but determination underneath muted terror all the way. She absolutely carries KIMI forward into a good movie rather than merely a cool concept with some bad tech baddies. 

Speaking of the bad guys, they lack Angela’s depth and nuance, to say the least. These are bad guys straight out of a John Hughes comedy. We’ve got the jeering henchmen—one tall and one short—the sinister hacker in his mother’s basement, even a villainous profit-driven corporation. The most interesting antagonist might well be the HR officer (Rita Wilson); in a so-real-it-stings turn, she offers a string of performative niceties and empty platitudes that convey how aggressively little she cares about Angela and the crime victim. There’s nothing gray here in any of them; these guys are each unequivocally terrible. This could be a flaw in a weaker movie but here it works: there’s no wasted energy adding dimensions to the enemy. This is Angela’s story; they are merely obstacles in it. I will confess I did struggle with Jaime Camil as the leader of the heavies—I have never wanted bad things to happen to Rogelio de la Vega before—but even he becomes a generic afterthought to Kravitz in short order. 

I’m running long here so let me touch on a few quick hits. There’s a great scene involving a protest that plays as aspirational in the same way the train scene in Darkest Hour does, but I bought this one in spite of the other turning me into a cynic. Despite exploding with action in the second half to the point that it’s almost a different movie, Soderbergh nails the ending even though he indulges in an 80s freeze frame finish. For such a convoluted set-up, KIMI wastes no time even though it shows rather than tells almost to a fault. The result is ninety excellent minutes of tense fun that fit snugly together. More than anything, though, I love that a story like this doesn’t settle for unredeemable vilification of technology; a lesser film might have ended with an Office Space-style clubbing of a Kimi device rather than letting that same worrying tech play a role in the resolution. 

There’s a ton of good here, and I had a great time watching KIMI and seeing Kravitz shine. But I cannot sell it any better than this: when I am alternately yelling profanity at the TV and whooping out loud for almost an hour of a movie’s run time, there’s no denying that the movie I’m watching works. Kimi works.