Why Ask Alexa when ‘Kimi’ does the Job Better?

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Kimi is a high-tech thriller from the always ambitious Steven Soderbergh, a director who never shies away from trying something new. With Kimi, Soderbergh nods to such classic predecessors as Rear Window, Blow Up and even his 1989 breakout film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, but spins a contemporary tale—or perhaps a story that belongs more to 2021 than to 2022.

That’s because, in the outdoor scenes, most everyone goes about masked. However, the outdoors must wait until the second half of the film because the protagonist, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), is agoraphobic, and only leaves home under duress. The condition may be linked to a sexual assault and was, in her words, aggravated by the isolation caused by COVID-19. When she first tries to leave her apartment, she puts key to lock, begins panting anxiously and collapses into a position of fetal-like vulnerability.

Masks or not, the story belongs to the present-day world of digital insecurity, loss of privacy and social isolation that cannot be bridged online. Angela works for a tech start-up, the Amygdala Corporation, whose upstart emperor has no clothes. Kimi opens with the corporate mastermind, Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio), in a Zoom interview. As the camera pulls away, his office is revealed to be a makeshift room in his house. When he takes a call from a shady investor, his face turns worried. The IPO in a week’s time should tap a stream of revenue for Kimi, his silken-voiced rival to Alexa and Siri, but the investor is impatient. Kimi is a better smart device, Hasling insists, because freelance techs such as Angela monitor the audio of algorithmically chosen customers to improve service. The identities of the owners being monitored is anonymous, he adds. And anyway, most of what she overhears is banal. “Kimi, play me Taylor Swift,” is typical. Her job is to record and file suggestions on how Kimi can better respond to questions.

And then she hears, buried under angry techno music in the background, a violent argument, perhaps a murder.

Angela lives in an incongruously large, expensive loft apartment in downtown Seattle. (She’s either exceptionally well paid or comes from money.) Her fear of leaving home reduces her to tele-dentistry, opening her mouth wide before her laptop and letting the dentist look inside. She communicates with the outside world with Tweets, Face Time and Zoom. Her Instagram account is an entirely made-up life set in places she’s never been. She communicates with her frustrated boyfriend primarily by text messages. Text balloons on screen form part of the film’s architecture.

Angela spends many minutes looking from her windows at the apartment across the way, spying into the lives of people through their windows, including her boyfriend. Another resident of that building is spying on her through binoculars. Spoiler alert: Peeping Tom will play a role in the climactic scene—in a way that inverts expectations.

So what to do about overhearing a murder? Call the boss? Hasling doesn’t want to hear about it. “Delete it,” he orders. “It’s not of our business. Just skip this one.” She persists, contacting Amygdala’s content officer. The unctuous Mrs. Chowdury (Rita Wilson) speaks in soothing PC phrases (“Amygdala takes evidence of wrongdoing very seriously”) even as she erases the audio file of the murder. A coverup is in progress. And there are more twists …

Soderbergh masterfully presents a panopticon of contemporary life. Angela is soon under surveillance by a techie employed by Hasling’s underworld financier, Yuri, working from a corner of his mother’s home. He could be in Moscow, Russia, or Moscow, Idaho, it doesn’t matter. Yuri can trace Angela’s movements through her cell phone and direct the killers who want her silenced. Soon enough, Angela learns that there are no firewalls that can’t be breached, no passwords that can’t be read, no codes that can’t be broken.

With her lively performance, Kravitz’s Angela almost recalls the plucky heroines of an earlier cinematic age. Her greatest obstacle is fear. The most brilliant sequence in Kimi is a long tracking shot of Angela’s unease when, leaving the false safety of her apartment, she ventures into the jarring world outside, seeking help in all the wrong places.

Kimi is streaming on Amazon Prime and HBO Max.