‘Kimi’: a frenetic thriller on HBO Max that questions the morality of technology corporations
by dipeshbardoliagmail-com
Screenwriter David Koepp, also the writer of ‘Kimi’, is known for his blockbusters, especially those directed by Spielberg: ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘War of the Worlds’, as well as other big-budget hits: ‘Mission: Impossible’ , Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’, a couple of installments of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and others. But the most interesting part of his work is in the smaller (or more modest in spirit) moviesregardless of budget), where Koepp not only poses more stimulating narrative exercises, but also launches more daring ideas.
For example, it happens with ‘The domino effect’, a small film -also directed by him- in which a widespread blackout unleashes chaos in a community; the brutal Beverly Hills posh satire ‘Death suits you so well’; the memorable pulp experiment ‘The Shadow’; or the fabulous -and spiritually very modest- ‘Panic Room’. Steven Soderbergh acknowledged having reviewed the latter several times on his list of what he saw and read during 2021.
The best of many of them also transpires in ‘Kimi’, a modest and concise tribute to Hitchcock (one of Koepp’s key references, which has referenced him in multiple films, such as the aforementioned ‘Mission: Impossible’ or ‘Panic Room’), and which benefits from the expertise of Steven Soderbergh for the narrative manipulation of image and sound. The result is a stimulating thriller, as memorable as it is inconsequential, about technology corporations and their way of occupying spaces that previously belonged to the private sphere.
We will meet Angela (fantastic Zoë Kravitz, who occupies one hundred percent of the footage on the screen), who he works for a company that has launched Kimi, an Alexa-style smart speaker. It is dedicated to reviewing error messages reported by users, until it finds a message that could contain an attack. She wants to deliver the message, but there is an added problem: she is agoraphobic and she is, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, locked up at home without daring to go out.
Critic dressed as a thriller
Steven Soderbergh, who has been more prolific than ever since coming out of short retirement in 2016, brings his editing techniques and tricks inherited from independent cinema to a modest production but with mainstream makings. ‘Kimi’ is a film that flows with amazing agility, and that allows itself to be very showy little experiments, such as the sequences in which Angela works in front of her screens and examines the audio, or the suffocating section in which she decides to leave her House.
And under this Hitchcockian thriller surface (accented by Cliff Martinez’s classic soundtrack), Koepp allows himself to launch a not very deep but very consistent criticism of tech corporations. Why do we let AIs and the companies that provide them penetrate our privacy? Are they a help in everyday life or do they enhance our problems? Are we capable of setting limits? ‘Kimi’ is not a thesis film but a fast-paced entertainment, but between persecutions and suspense it sows some seeds of mistrust.
Some of the film’s ideas run along somewhat clichéd lines, but Soderbergh and Koepp manage to inject a clever mischievousness into their approach. For example, the decision that Rita Wilson — usually destined for positive roles — brings to life a boss who can only be half trusted; or the strange and disturbing final shot… all of this is reinforced by Kravitz’s wonderful performance, which gives his character a fragility with which it is easy to empathize, and which contrasts with the army of apps, appliances and AIs that attend.
Shot during the pandemic, Soderbergh also manages to offer us a far from terrifying but very serious vision of the mental problems that we have developed or have been exacerbated during COVID. It all comes together in ‘Kimi’, a suspenseful diversion on whose surface you just have to scratch a little for stimulating details of criticism and nonconformity to emerge.
