The terrifically efficient and just plain terrific Steven Soderbergh thriller “Kimi” has been streaming for two weeks now, ever since sneaking onto HBO Max with a lack of fanfare bordering on undercover espionage.
Having seen it twice now — no chore, believe me — its bracing COVID-19-era anxieties amid familiar Hollywood blueprints strike me as a template of its own, to be used by filmmakers of the future. Audiences of the present, meantime, don’t need to know how to read a blueprint. They need only enjoy the steady pull and the satisfactions offered by an unassumingly confident genre picture of serious distinction.
For starters “Kimi” really does look, feel, play and deliver like a tightly sprung movie conceived with a big screen’s spatial possibilities in mind. Ever since he threatened retirement a few years ago, Soderbergh’s breathless low-budget productivity has been astonishing, and nearly all the results have been worthwhile, though some felt like more like time killed, however proficiently, rather than time filled, imaginatively. His previous project was the tasty if narratively tangled “No Sudden Move,” also shot mid-pandemic.
“Kimi” is a grade higher, and its forthright but easy-breathing acknowledgment of pandemic life, pertaining especially to those already prone to isolation, becomes a major asset. Zoë Kravitz plays Angela, a quick-witted “voice stream interpreter” employed by a Seattle tech giant (think Amazon) who has profound anxiety challenges. Her days are spent in her sunny loft apartment amid a stringently routinized existence: exer-cycling; laundry; the occasional tryst with a man who lives across the street.
Angela combs through a daily data stream of customer/smart speaker interactions. Kimi is a next-gen variation on Alexa or Siri, but with humans monitoring which, in theory, improves the smart speaker’s interpretive abilities. It is also the purring, volcano-shaped gadget on which her company has wagered an imminent public stock offering.
One day, Angela hears a Kimi recording of what could be a murder in progress. Around the film’s midpoint, she must leave her loft to meet in person with a supervisor (Rita Wilson, chillingly reassuring) who knows about the recording. For the first time in months, possibly years, Angela braves the world outside, and Soderbergh’s run-and-gun camera technique, carefully held in check until that point, puts us firmly in the psychic headspace of this darting, newly threatened tech wizard.
Everything works in the telling, even when the separate elements of “Kimi” willfully clash with one another. Kravitz gives an unerring, sharp-edged star performance, all lightning fingers and firing synapses. Composer Cliff Martinez goes for Bernard Herrmann here, but Herrmann in his restrained mood. The swank symphonic orchestrations on the soundtrack, with a particular reliance on woodwinds, refers back to the unused score Herrmann wrote for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain.” It’s a disarming old-school counterpoint to the presence and energy of Kravitz, who doesn’t have a speck of conspicuous Old Hollywood anything about her, except for an ability to capture and propel every scene like a star.
Screenwriter David Koepp freely acknowledges his Old Hollywood inspirations, primarily “Sorry, Wrong Number” (taken from Lucille Fletcher’s radio drama) and Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”On the peerless “Observations on Film Art” blog by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Bordwell writes wonderfully on “Kimi” and its historical innards. “Kimi” also deploys the techno-surveillance paranoia theme underpinning a later classic, “The Conversation.” Soderbergh isn’t hiding any of that, nor stray ingredients of ‘90s-era paranoia vehicles, such as Sandra Bullock in the now-hilarious techno-antique “The Net.”
Koepp knows the value of claustrophobia and home invasion scenarios (he wrote “Panic Room”) and he brings Angela’s waking nightmare to a bloody but just-bloody-enough finale, where Angela feels most at home.
Peculiarly, (though they’re hardly the first thrillers to do so) both “Kimi” and another new streaming item, “No Exit” on Hulu, exploit the viciously quick possibilities of nail gun violence.
Before it gets there, director Damien Power’s film sticks largely to setup, and a single set: a snowbound rest stop, where a group of strangers must wait out the storm. The heroine (Havana Rose Liu) discovers an abducted girl trapped in a van parked outside.
“No Exit” aims for a serviceable execution of escapist dread, in a storyline dependent on female punishment. (The men get nailed, too.) “Kimi” operates in a different sphere, with different methods of engagement.
“No Exit” isn’t much to look at, but Soderberghs don’t come along every day. When the weapons of narrative choice come out, it’s worth noting exactly how Soderbergh stages the key shots: wittily, obliquely, with a defiant lack of visual overkill.
With “Kimi,” Soderbergh creates an ideally uneasy bookend to “Contagion,” his 2011 pandemic thriller so many millions dread-rewatched nearly two years ago. That film was, and is, for many, a little too dire for easy viewing. Without selling its protagonist short, “Kimi” moves like a streak, managing suspense, intrigue, story structure, visual panache — and some recognizable, verifiable truths about what our work-at-home lives have been like lately.
The real world is a fine place to start, whatever kind of movie you’re making.
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“Kimi” is streaming on HBO Max. “No Exit” is streaming on Hulu.
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