A tense Hitchcockian thriller for the COVID era, “Kimi” is an odd beast of a movie. It’s anchored by a gripping performance from Zoë Kravitz, and when she’s the only person on screen (which is about 90% of the time), you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat and unable to look away. But oddly enough, after channeling some of the greatest directors of all time and unleashing several masterful sequences, director Steven Soderbergh allows the film to slide right into video territory at the end, dropping its leading lady – and the viewer. .
Written by industry vet David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Carlito’s Way,” 2002’s “Spider-Man”), the film centers entirely on Angela Childs (Kravitz), a blue-haired, eccentric young woman and often abrasive who lives alone in a high-tech apartment. Every day she fights with her building upstairs neighbor, looks into people’s apartments across the street, makes video calls to loved ones (mother, therapist, dentist) and fights agoraphobia extreme induced by a trauma that made her a prisoner in her own home. Angela also does her job: listen to and record brief audio clips from the “Kimi” devices (think Alexa, Siri, etc.) of unknown people.
With her trusty Kimi just yards away, ready to light up and spring into action whenever she calls her name, Angela goes about her business. Most of the clips she gets are harmless enough – users ask the device to play a song or make a phone call – but one day she discovers a file with loud, aggressive techno music. Deep in the background noise, she thinks she hears a woman being violently assaulted.
As genre conventions dictate, no one believes her. Angela digs deeper and deeper, against everyone’s wishes and our own suspicions that such actions might be motivated by her own past as a survivor of a violent attack, and she finds more. That woman on the case was murdered, and now she’s the only one who can stop the man behind it all.
Google “Master of Suspense,” and the name that pops up is Alfred Hitchcock, arguably one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. The man defined multiple genres (action thriller, slasher film) still in play today, and there’s no doubt that if he were somehow alive and young and up to his mark in 2022, “Kimi” is the kind of movie he’d be doing. Hitchcock classics like “Rear Window,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” and “Vertigo” are all over this movie.
It’s also worth mentioning that one of the greatest filmmakers of a later generation, Brian De Palma, is an unapologetic follower of Hitchcock, and one of his best films, 1981’s “Blow Out,” seems to have been the main influence here. Then there’s 1974’s “The Conversation,” one of De Palma’s friend and contemporary Francis Ford Coppola’s finest films, which is also an undeniable ingredient in this sinister, sonic cinematic smoothie.
These are films about protagonists with one sense (sight, hearing) that has overcome all others – and most likely their common sense. Travolta in ‘Blow Out’, Hackman in ‘The Conversation’, Stewart in ‘Rear Window’, now Kravitz in ‘Kiki’ – all succumb to a deep and disturbing paranoia, walking the fine line between obsession and ‘doing the wrong thing’. good thing”. “All become obsessed with the lives (and/or deaths) of people they barely know, risking alienating those in their own lives, only to uncover some truth as they re-examine again and again the evidence searching for clues in audio files or through their binoculars.Each of their films also functions as a commentary on the world of the time, as fears of invading privacy collide with the natural human concern for its neighbours.
