Critic’s rating: ★★★½
(89 minutes; R)
Contemporary tech thrillers don’t come much more fast-moving, compact or of the moment than Steven Soderbergh‘s “Kimi.” Not bad for a filmmaker who in 2013 famously announced that “movies don’t matter anymore” and said that he was retiring from making theatrical releases.
While he’s since reversed course with several big-screen releases, “Kimi” is his third consecutive movie made exclusively for the small screen, on HBO Max. It’s not small in ambition, though, and its impact is suitably large and pleasant: For an evening of HBO-and-thrill, you could do far worse than Soderbergh’s latest, for which he again does triple duty, serving as director, cinematographer and editor.
“Kimi,” built on a script by David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”), with its basic set-up clearly references Hitchcock’s classic “Rear Window.” That’s particularly evident during the first act. Angela (Zoe Kravitz), a bright, attractive young tech worker employed by a company that makes a Siri/Alexa-like device called Kimi, is confined to her sleek Seattle apartment, where she spends a little too much time each day peering out her tall floor-to-ceiling windows at residents of a building across the way. Unlike Jimmy Stewart’s photographer character in the Hitchcock film, stuck at home because of a broken leg, Angela can’t leave her place because of a debilitating case of agoraphobia. Any resemblance to the recent satire “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” is purely unintentional, yo.
One day, doing her job monitoring voice streams on Kimi — the better to enhance the device’s ability to communicate with users, you see — Angela overhears what sounds like a violent crime. Playing amateur detective, she pulls her orange hoodie over her blue hair, slides on her protective mask (the film was shot in the Covid era), wills herself to ward off mental demons and heads outdoors to travel to her company’s offices. There, she hopes to enlist the support of an upper-level employee (Rita Wilson), who has said she’ll loop the FBI into the case.
And down the rabbit hole Angela falls, into a conspiracy that some folks from her company go to great lengths to cover up. The surveillance goes deep (“The Conversation,” anyone?). No spoilers, except this: The body count ultimately will be a higher number than 1. Suffice it to say that smarts and luck go a long way in helping our heroine fight her way out of big, scary trouble.
The cleverly plotted cat-and-mouse game offers its share of suspense and surprise reversals, and the story is spiked with a few pleasant detours, including a romantic interlude with one of the guys she likes to observe across the way, an unexpected appearance by a man who’s been crushing on her from a distance, and a few video-chat sequences with a goofy cyber-tracker genius from overseas who always insists on engaging in comic-but-serious flirtation.
But it’s largely a one-woman show for Kravitz, who recently showed off her acting chops to good effect in glossy mini-series “Big Little Lies” and the otherwise undercooked gender-reversed mini-series adaptation of the movie “High Fidelity.” She also co-stars as Catwoman in next month’s new “The Batman” movie. Kravitz makes it all look natural and easy, convincingly portraying a girl power protagonist who’s ultimately likable despite some off putting quirks. No easy feat, that.
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