It tracks that Steven Soderbergh, a film-maker who’s spent his retirement from making films mostly making more films, would try his very best to maximise time during the pandemic. Not only do his intimidatingly extensive lists of everything he’s been watching and reading show that he’s obsessively consuming, but he’s also been frantically creating, finishing one movie and then making two others in full. His new deal with HBO Max has seen him take Meryl Streep out on a boat in the elegant, semi-improvised comedy Let Them All Talk before sticking to the Michigan mainland in the tense crime drama No Sudden Move. His latest is a far simpler, yet no less enjoyable, achievement, a tight, mostly one-location thriller riffing on Alfred Hitchcock as well as OG Hitchcock riffer Brian De Palma.
Kimi is the name of an Alexa-style device with a key USP: people. A large scattered team of operatives sift through the many interactions between users and machines to perfect the dynamic, ensuring that miscommunication is kept to a minimum. Zoë Kravitz’s agoraphobic Angela (perhaps a reference to The Net’s similarly named hacker) spends her days listening to such audio, quarantining herself from the world as Covid rumbles on. The pandemic has set her anxieties back and she refuses to go outside despite an over-the-road neighbour (comedian Byron Bowers) trying to tempt her on a date. But when Angela hears something sinister on a flagged Kimi stream, her safe, insulated world is suddenly in disarray.
