Angela (Zoë Kravitz) is a work from home technician for the latest and greatest voice-activated assistant, Kimi. A controversial practice, Kimi sends recordings of any incorrectly fulfilled commands so that the program can be altered by techs like Angela. One such recording is nearly incomprehensible except for the voice of a woman in distress at the very end of the clip. Fearing that she is in trouble, Angela contacts her bosses about the clip, but she soon discovers that they may be more interested in protecting the company than the consumers. 

Kimi, the latest from director Steven Soderbergh, is a taught 89-minute techno-thriller set in the age of Covid. Soderbergh continues his trend of topical and timely pieces that feel almost like guerilla filmmaking on the hot button issues at the forefront of everyone’s mind. It is not surprising, then, that he chooses to address the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns head-on, while also commenting heavily on privacy in an ever-increasing digital world and corporate immunity as CEOs of all the major tech companies continue to report massive gains. 

In the lead is Kravitz who does her best to garner sympathy for the cliché-ridden Angela, an agoraphobe who witnesses a crime and must overcome her debilitations to save the day. That is not to write off or discredit those who do suffer from agoraphobia, but the already tired trope is used very ineffectively here. As the heroine of the story, she is well protected from the various obstacles and threats sent her way, and while her motivations are justified and noble, Kravitz plays her with an air of arrogance so much so she comes off as a bit of a brat and it becomes hard to root for her on a character level.  

It should be noted that Kimi is penned by David Koepp, and while Soderberg’s style is very clearly present on screen, this is not an entirely original work for the director. Koepp’s script does a lot of things very well, but it is not without flaws. Most erroneous is how he handles Angela’s character. Koepp, for reasons that can only be fruitlessly speculated on, chooses to highlight elements of her character without ever going into much depth on it. While Kimi is not necessarily a story about Angela’s past, her backstory clearly informs her actions, and it is strange that for a script where Koepp chooses to make so many statements about the world, he is silent here.   

What Koepp does do well in this modern spin on the Rear Window (1954) framework is that, like a good Hitchcockian thriller, all the tiny location details set up in Act 1 have paid off by Act 3. That being said, Kravitz is not James Stewart and Koepp is not John Michael Hayes. This story just does not work as effectively in a modern age. Even after Angela strips away the interference, unlike Rear Window, we are deprived of the visual element of the suspected crime, and it becomes far less captivating when all we have to go off of is a quick audio clip. The guesswork is gone, we know without a doubt that a crime was committed, and now we are stuck with Angela, inexplicably and heroically, overcoming all of her fears and reservations about the outside world as she fends off the comically incompetent goons dispatched by the company.   

Kimi, released straight to HBO Max by Warner Bros, feels like a straight to DVD movie of old. It is not bad, but it is not great either, though there is a lot to be said about its in-and-out runtime.  Your mileage may vary, however, depending on your own tolerance for digital assistants and life behind a screen. It is simply exhausting to watch, even from the comfort of home. Koepp’s script starts off strong enough but fails to really hammer home a clear message and instead settles for rattling off a list of all the buzz words without going much deeper than that. Coupled with some sloppy and downright ugly action sequences as the film expands beyond the confines of Angela’s apartment’s walls, Kimi comes apart at the seams and topples into a faux-feel-good coda that, for those that still have any investment in Angela may find nice, but for those whom she has pushed away will only sigh in relief as the looming end credit crawl signifies that we can finally hit the back button and close our window with Angela.