Kimi - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

In early 2020 the world as we know it had screeched to a halt. Crowded city streets with car horns blaring became scenes out of I Am Legend or another apocalypse film. Buildings normally flooded with office workers and young professionals became a barren wasteland of the occasional security guard and cleaning crew. An industry that also changed gears was the movie business. Major studio blockbuster films took a turn toward smaller budgeted, simpler films with straightforward premises. We went from Star Wars and Avengers in 2019 to more films like The Guilty and Malcolm & Marie, both Netflix titles. Huge casts were replaced with smaller ones and massive sets were traded in for consolidated films that take place in just a couple locations. Which is why we’ve gotten Kimi, one of the latest films to drop on HBO Max. General audiences and critics alike can appreciate the lockdown era style of tight, slimmed down filmmaking. Future generations will look back at the films from this slice of history and get a glimpse into what life was like for those alive during the Covid pandemic. While Kimi is no brilliant piece of cinema, it’s a perfectly serviceable and decent piece of film that is effectively able to capture some of the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the populace. But if you give Kimi a chance, you’ll probably find yourself echoing the virtual assistance’s popular phrase “I’m here.”

SYNOPSIS - This trip back into lockdown starts with voiceover from an up and coming tech giant Bradley (Derek DelGaudio), as he explains some features of a new virtual assistant, Kimi, and her superiority over other versions of automated helpers. “We are flagging miscommunication so Kimi can better understand you”, he explains to an interviewer as we catch up with him in his home office, rows of books adorn the sophisticated background of the wall behind him. The camera adjusts and we see what the interviewer wasn’t privy to, that this makeshift office space is really just an organized wall in his cluttered garage with ladders and junk piled up around him. This exposition about the world we’re about to enter is amusingly arranged within the film while poking fun at the fake reality of the modern sugar coated Instagram/Facebook/Zoom call world we currently occupy. You’re only ever shown exactly what the poster wants, which is highlighted again as the suit coat and tie sporting Bradley stands up after the call ends still wearing his pajama pants. But after speaking to his wife, Bradley heads upstairs to check on his sleeping son, but not before the screenplay inserts an obligatory ominous phone call to let us know that not everything is as it seems.

We’re then introduced to our blue-haired protagonist Angela (Zoe Kravitz), as she shelters in place and works from home on the Kimi intelligence system. But after texting a neighbor Terry (Byron Bowers), “What if I met you for an egg thing at the truck?”, she begins demonstrating some peculiar behaviors. These patterns and tendencies are in a way a sort of time capsule, exemplified by Angela’s constantly dousing her hands with sanitizer and then waving them back and forth to dry. Kravitz is surprisingly well suited for the part, she plays a good paranoid shut in, her face carries a underlying fear and sadness that’s rarely found in people of her age demographic. But she does an exceptional job of embodying and demonstrating the levels of anxiety and fear many individuals experienced over the past two years of lockdown. I found it also strangely reminiscent of the obsessive compulsive behaviors of Jack Nickolson in As Good As It Gets, opening and closing the lock on his doors and giving himself a pep talk to exit his flat and brave the streets of New York. Or in Angela’s case, Seattle. I almost laughed out loud when later that evening, after summoning Terry over and having sex, she immediately begins removing the pillowcases and stripping the bedsheets off, presumably concerned about the germs that could’ve gotten on her linens. But the next day after encountering an ominous audio recording of the Kimi system trying to understand something, Angela is caught up in whirlwind of chaos and murder.

This film is razor tight at under an hour and a half, there’s very little fat to be trimmed and you’d think that would equal a fantastically quick pace. But with such a simple plot and straightforward story, the film actually takes a little time playing around with it’s quirky pandemic life cues and character development, which it does a decent job with before the second act jumps into the actual plot. But once Angela’s audio discovery forces her to leave her apartment in order to report the suspected crime, we step on the rollercoaster ride and don’t step off until the credits roll. Leaving her apartment is made to feel an otherworldly experience, people whizz by like the sound of passing cars. Most of these shots are done with a handheld camera, the jerky movements seems as if we’re following behind her like a stray animal. The direction from Soderbergh is tight and the precise editing make these sequences feel fluid yet add to the nervous atmosphere the film is working to create. The music was also pretty immersing, although a bit odd at times, chiming away like a broken lullaby player above a empty baby crib. An everyday ride on the subway is fairly effectively made to feel completely alien, like a trip to the Avatar home world of Pandora. The director Steven Soderbergh, who was at one point of the 1990’s one of the most bankable directors, has been pretty hit or miss lately. But Kimi definitely falls much closer to a hit, even if it’s not a roaring directorial achievement.

SUMMARY - This film is a shining example of doing a lot while working with very little. These consolidated pandemic films aren’t usually as deep thematically but they can be very effective dramas and thrillers. Even if Kimi isn’t the most reliable personal assistant, she does get the job done in the end.