Review of the film "Kimi" - Steven Soderbergh's conspiracy thriller with the neurotic Zoe Kravitz
A tense Hitchcock-esque thriller about how smart speakers, like doors, have ears.
IT professional Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz) works remotely. Her main task is to fix bugs in the Kimi smart column related to the discommunication of a person and an algorithm. One user wants to play the Taylor Swift track, but the device does not see the difference between the pronoun Me and the same name of the song, the other is desperately trying to explain that she needs to buy napkins (kitchen paper) and not go to a restaurant (Green Kitchen). For days on end, the girl listens to recordings from homes from all over America, until one day she makes a terrible discovery: Angela comes across a file where, as she thinks, there is circumstantial evidence of sexualized violence. Bosses ignore the problem (although they listen to clients, they will not get into their affairs), and acquaintances reduce the solution of the mystery to the trauma of the heroine herself. To prove her case, the girl gets out of the house and goes to a colleague, but her fear of open spaces turns every step into a test.
They say directors make the same movie all their lives. If someone can refute this thesis, then it is Steven Soderbergh - a man-orchestra who not only manages to combine the functions of an editor, cameraman and director, but also consistently shoots a new picture once a year, hardly similar to the previous one. Only a few techniques and themes converge in his filmography: love for intricate dialogue, sympathy for outsiders (he himself is kind of superfluous in Hollywood), homage to old Hollywood and innovative shooting on the iPhone. Although Kimi formally dubs another director's chamber thriller about traumatized women and gaslighting ("Not in Myself"), there is a real abyss between these two works.
“Kimi” is a skillful portrait of the era of the coronavirus, which at one point begins to speculate on conspiracy theories. If the film opens like Hitchcock's "Rear Window", then closer to the finale it acquires a whole complex of modern phobias: listening to personal devices, surveillance by special services and hiding sexual violence - Angela, who goes out into the open world for the first time in a long time, becomes infected with mass panic (as experience will show, not unreasonably). Covid here is just one of the many plot circumstances, and yet it is through the prism of the epidemic that Kimi is revealed from a new perspective: this is a very cynical movie about how, after one tragedy, trust in society and those who support it can disappear. regulates.
Where it's hard to blame Soderbergh is exploiting the newfangled virus theme. The director filmed the prophetic Infection, so he expressed all his political messages there, while in Kimi, on the contrary, he is more interested in the mechanics of the genre. This is a claustrophobic thriller, and a black comedy, and a MeToo drama, and a sketch on the theme of isolation life. Soderbergh is one of the few who manages to put together disparate pieces so harmoniously and seamlessly. “Kimi” is such a constructor film that shoots all guns on the spot: you need suspense – the camera dutifully takes a Dutch angle, you need to defuse the atmosphere – the characters will joke caustically again, and in the most disturbing moments instrumental Hitchcock music plays in the background. In a world where every day brings a new newsbreak, and you barely have time to follow the events around you, Kimi is the perfect movie about everything at once and about nothing in particular.
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