One of the several small pleasures of Kimi, the new Steven Soderbergh movie, is the stylish ease with which it's been crafted. After 33 years of making every kind of picture, from spy thrillers and romcoms to mega-budget star product and semi-improvisational whatchamacallits, Soderbergh is still in love with movies. At this point he probably could have turned out a modestly budgeted film like Kimi during nap times. But no naps were taken—the movie is alive with the director's customary wit and concentration, and the making of it (under difficult lockdown conditions) clearly had his full attention.
The story is an exercise in techno-paranoia, which is always fun, with echoes of such genre classics as Coppola's The Conversation, De Palma's Blow Out, and Antonioni's Blowup, along with grateful nods to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. (Cliff Martinez, who composed the score, does an arresting job of suggesting the somber themes written by Bernard Herrmann for other Hitchcock films like Psycho and Vertigo.) The clever script, by David Koepp, looks around at the shifting realities of our current cultural moment without getting over-dramatically bent out of shape about what it finds. Although we might.
