'Kimi' Review: Soderbergh's Latest on Post-COVID Paranoia
'Kimi' Review: Soderbergh's Latest on Post-COVID Paranoia
It’s one of the first COVID films to incorporate our new reality in a way that feels like natural texture instead of distracting opportunism.
Written by Tom Knoblauch
R - Crime, Thriller, Drama (89 minutes)
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dir. Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson, Erika Christensen
The 70s marked a golden age for paranoia thrillers like All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Day of the Condor, and Chinatown. There was an interesting populism to it; trust in government waned and so it (along with the corporations that run the world) became the villains in popular entertainment. So the genre became this cultural artifact of a fracturing society that never healed and the thriller finally saw a way out of Hitchcock Homage Syndrome. Maybe the scariest thing isn’t the sociopath in the motel or the unpredictable forces of nature or even the amoral but curious—maybe it’s the entire foundation of our society that you’ll always be powerless to stop. The classic paranoia thriller is less of a freakshow and more of a nihilistic jeremiad. It feels both of its time but also its implications make it applicable to the permanent state of corruption within human society. You’ve always been the little guy who gets stepped on and then, as Melville put it, the great shroud of the sea rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
What’s surprising to me is that the paranoia thriller itself is a relatively minor genre in today’s cinematic landscape. It has been absorbed into the television procedural and, most counterintuitively, into the world of superheroes. The problem is that you can’t really be nihilistic about the inherent corruption of government while also accepting Pentagon funding. Rather than anti-authority screeds, works like the Marvel Cinematic Universe have both dominated the entire field and are regularly made in cooperation with the U.S. military—a disturbingly common Hollywood practice in what David Sirota refers to as “the post-Top Gun era” wherein “…military officials became increasingly blunt about how they deploy the carrot of subsidized hardware and the stick of denied access to whatever they want.” The Pentagon’s criteria for cooperation is simple: “[H]ow could the proposed production benefit the military . . . could it help us in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?”
Seemingly out of nowhere, then, director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp have conjured up an excellent paranoia thriller called Kimi which is now streaming on HBO Max and stars Zoë Kravitz as Angela, an agoraphobic employee of a massive tech corporation. She works from home and has debilitating anxiety about leaving her apartment—something that feels natural to the script and clearly made production simpler for a film shot during the COVID pandemic. Like Rear Window, it is claustrophobic by design, though its focus and commentary ultimately has more in common with The Parallax View, elevating Kimi past the limits of Hitchcock homages like Blow Out (and really most of Brian De Palma’s oeuvre). Her job consists of diagnosing audio files that the Alexa-like voice-controlled virtual assistant system, Kimi, struggles to comprehend. This generally consists of slang or complex intonation, which Angela can update with simple coded categories. But one file seems to be the sound of a crime being committed—possibly murder.
What ensues is a classic 70s plot where what looks bad is actually much worse—where trying to help save one person means taking on something insurmountably large and powerful. It’s not trying to shame viewers for using Amazon. It’s smart enough to know that, while we’re all complicit to varying degrees, we’re not really capable of fixing anything. And so when Angela finds herself up against insurmountable odds, the stakes are simple; Soderbergh resists getting preachy and lets the reality of our domination set the tone of suffocating doom. And most importantly, he has fun with it. Koepp sets up a tight script where plenty of foreshadowing allows for a big payoff that plays like Panic Room meets Blood Simple.
When the action finally leaves the apartment, Soderbergh mimics Angela’s internal state—the controlled, multi-angled coverage switches to shaky, long tracking shots where the paranoia is heightened and twofold: the shapeless, vague dread of open spaces and the very real men who mean her harm for knowing too much. Angela is harsh, funny, and resourceful under pressure, which Kravitz nails as she carries most of Kimi on her own. It’s difficult to make one compelling scene of a character video messaging another; Soderbergh and Kravitz make several here. It’s one of the first COVID films to incorporate our new reality in a way that feels like natural texture instead of distracting opportunism.
Kimi is his first work in over a decade that really hits the mark. It’s simple, funny, and thrilling. And I can only hope it takes us one step closer to a real renaissance of paranoia thrillers in place of propaganda tentpoles. God knows there’s plenty to not believe in.