KIMI debuts on HBO Max on Feb. 10, 2022.
Despite numerous threats of retirement, Steven Soderbergh keeps making new and interesting films, and we’re all the better for it. His latest, KIMI, unfolds in Seattle as society emerges from COVID-19, and it follows an agoraphobic tech worker named Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), who hasn’t yet readjusted to going outside, but who ends up being put to the test when she discovers digital evidence of a crime. Part pandemic drama, part corporate conspiracy, and entirely entertaining, the tightly wound 90-minute thriller comes courtesy of Panic Room writer David Koepp, though it’s also another intriguing visual experiment from Soderbergh, whose continued tinkering with digital technology has led him here, to a movie about the way we see and experience the world in the age of isolation.
To Childs, her enormous studio apartment is her safe haven. It’s where she exercises, relaxes, and has passionate sex with Terry (Byron Bowers), a man she got to know during lockdown, when they saw each other from their respective windows on opposite sides of the street. She does not, however, leave her front door to accompany Terry on actual dates. She can’t. Her condition won’t let her. It overwhelms her and shortens her breath every time she tries, and it’s complicated even further by the lingering presence of the virus. She is, in a way, stuck in time, unable to re-enter the world alongside her peers. Instead, she spends her days poring through audio recordings from various KIMIs — Alexa-like devices placed in nearly every home — to help fix communication problems between strangers and their tech. Ironically, her own short-tempered communication with the people around her could use some work.
When one of the snippets she reviews appears to capture a violent crime, she begins communicating up the managerial chain of Amygdala Corp, her enormously powerful employers. Instead of immediate help, she’s met with brick wall after brick wall, each painted in carefully PR-crafted language about how her concerns are being taken seriously. At each turn, however, something seems amiss, and Childs gets roped into much more than she bargained for when she finally steps outside, eventually leading to an explosive (if slightly delayed) action climax.
The physical, emotional, and narrative details are laid out expertly from the moment KIMI begins. The single apartment block, where much of the story unfolds, is introduced through characters peering into each other’s homes — a visual reminder of metropolitan lockdown, when urban dwellers grew more accustomed to seeing glimpses of their neighbors’ private routines, and to being seen just as intimately. It’s Hitchock’s Rear Window, only if every character were James Stewart’s L.B. Jeffries, confined to four walls and their own voyeuristic gaze. However, as much as Soderbergh lingers on this eerie physical element of the new world, he takes a similarly discomforting approach to the two-war mirror that is the digital device. Desktops and smartphones show up in spades, but instead of shooting them as surfaces or objects, he captures them the way he would other characters, cutting between similarly framed close ups of Kravitz and her screens. He films them as if they were in conversation with one another, whether Childs is FaceTiming other characters — her therapist (Emily Kuroda), her concerned mother (Robin Givens), or her savvy coworker in Romania (Alex Dobrenko) — or whether she’s simply going through the motions of her job and interacting with software. There’s a constant aesthetic awareness, no matter how subtle, that what Childs is looking at is always, in some way, looking back at her.
As a tech worker, she’s aware of technology’s omnipresence and she takes appropriate precautions, but this is her “normal” now. Technology is the way she interacts with the world, and each time she puts on her noise-canceling headphones, or fiddles around with an audio switchboard to better hear her recordings, the film’s incisive sound mix follows suit and places us directly in her headspace. I have it on good authority that Soderbergh would prefer people watched KIMI on their TVs rather than on their phones or computers (despite its streaming availability on HBO Max), but watching it with headphones turns Childs’ discovery of the disturbing audio clip into an especially enveloping experience.
Soderbergh, who once again doubles as his own cinematographer and camera operator, is methodical in his crafting of interior scenes. There’s a calmness and stillness to them, interrupted only by Childs’ agoraphobic episodes as she attempts to leave her front door. This procedural visual approach matches Koepp’s screenplay, which carefully builds Childs’ story through a number of unassuming interactions — with neighbors, and with news stories from the outside world — all of which are meant to flesh out the world in which she’s living (or rather, in which she’s not living, given her predicament). However, the script is so taut in its structure that practically every worldbuilding element serves a dual function. Each detail is a sly but important setup for where the story eventually leads, once Childs realizes there may be larger and more sinister forces at play than mere corporate doublespeak. There isn’t a single wasted word or moment of screen time.
This layered approach to the outside world is matched by the way Soderbergh details Childs herself, both in her appearance and in her point of view. Her dyed blue bob-cut is no doubt shorthand for her involvement in the technological space, but she isn’t limited by familiar tropes and ideas. There’s a depth and richness to her that Kravitz manages to slowly unfurl, even when she’s the only person on screen for lengthy stretches. While Childs exhibits plenty of physical comfort behind closed doors (both when she’s alone, and in Terry’s occasional presence), a few subtly obsessive and repetitive actions hint that she’s barely holding together this façade. When she has no choice but to finally step outside — after a woman at corporate, Natalie Chowdhury (Rita Wilson), agrees to help her on the condition that they speak in person — Kravitz’s entire appearance and demeanor undergo a radical transformation. Her movements become more stilted. Her gaze, from behind her mask, is more shifty and paranoid, and she layers herself in baggy clothing, as if trying to shield herself from the outside world.
However, the biggest shift when Childs ventures outdoors comes courtesy of the film’s own visual fabric. Soderbergh, who has been shooting on video since Full Frontal in 2002 (and even shot two recent films on iPhones: Unsane and High-Flying Bird) takes his digital experimentation a step further, and launches an all-out assault on Childs using his camera. It sways, and tilts, and weaves in and out of her orbit as she makes her way from place to place, but it lacks the stability and polish of the interior sequences. It’s janky, and matched by a mischievously jittery score by Cliff Martinez, and it all feels heightened thanks to a lack of motion blur (a technique popularized on film by Saving Private Ryan, which draws attention to artifice and turns movement into a distinctly sensory experience). The exteriors are tighter and more suffocating than any room. The world feels like it’s about to collapse in on Childs, which not only captures her fears of the outside, but her paranoia of digital surveillance, and of always being watched by her environment. The way we see her, in these moments, is not unlike if we were chasing her with a smartphone camera and invading her privacy and personal space. This experimentation isn’t just for the sake of playing with digital cameras. It makes the specter of persecution feel real and tangible, even before there’s any real person on Childs’ tail, and it injects each scene with a riveting intensity.
KIMI is ultimately fun at every step of the way, from its delightfully calculated setups, to its wildly inventive chase scenes that play like an aesthetic malfunction, and place us squarely in Childs’ shoes. The film’s eventual action-packed crescendo is a result of so many callbacks, reversal and payoffs that it plays like a reward for following along, and there are few things more satisfying.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/dDPGkXw
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