Steven Soderbergh’s tech thriller “Kimi,” filmed partly in Seattle last year, is really two movies, and in one of them you see hints of the very good movie “Kimi” could have been. For the first half of its tight 89 minutes, “Kimi” takes place almost entirely in the chic loft apartment of Angela (Zoë Kravitz), a Seattle tech worker whose (rather awful-sounding) remote job is to respond to user complaints about a Siri-like virtual assistant named Kimi. (Ads for Kimi, plastered all over this movie’s Seattle, read “Your Life, Simplified.”) Struggling with anxiety and some trauma in her past, Angela is reluctant to leave her apartment, spending time gazing out the window at the neighbors. Working one day, she thinks she hears evidence of a violent crime on a voice stream, and before you can say “Rear Window,” Angela’s obsessed with the murder that she’s sure she heard.
That’s all in the first half, and Kravitz — who pretty much carries this movie solo — makes for engrossing company. Both smart and bored, Angela needs something to fixate on (other than meticulously making her bed and brushing her teeth), and she becomes animated by the assault that she’s sure she heard. We watch as she consults with co-workers — who don’t share her alarm — and heads down an electronic rabbit hole, efficiently clicking, that gets darker the further she falls.
But what starts off as an appealingly techie twist on Hitchcock too quickly deteriorates into a chase movie, in which we realize that every character except Angela is completely opaque. Seattle looks handsome (if surprisingly sunny) in the movie’s handful of outdoor sequences — I love how at one point the Space Needle peeks out, like it’s waving at us — and Soderbergh does some effectively eerie camera work conveying Angela’s disorientation when she finally ventures out. (As always, he shot the film himself, under his cinematographer pseudonym Peter Andrews. A brief sequence shot on a Sound Transit light rail train feels especially claustrophobic.)
Things fall apart pretty badly at the end, with some violence that felt unnecessarily lurid and some villains who desperately needed a little more backstory. But Kravitz kept me interested until the final frame; her Angela is at once vulnerable, superhuman and amusingly wry. When a colleague on her computer wonders what sort of person would make up a fake life online, Angela’s having none of it. “Literally everybody,” she says.
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'KIMI'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity)
Running time: 1:29
Where to watch: Now streaming on HBO Max
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