The key art for "Kimi," Steven Soderbergh's nifty new micro-thriller, features a glum-faced, blue-haired young woman in an orange hoodie. You might reasonably conclude that this is Kimi, but no, her name is actually Angela. She works for the tech company that created Kimi, a high-tech virtual assistant that answers its customer's every request with a bright magenta light and a reassuring "I'm here." Like Siri or Alexa, but with more sophisticated (Read: Invasive) learning capabilities, Kimi will dim your lights, play your music and even fire up HBO Max, which is where you'll find this latest fictional dispatch from a world under self-imposed 24-7 surveillance.
Soderbergh drops us into that world with a casualness that's unnerving precisely because of how unnerving it isn't; this is how we live now, he and screenwriter David Koepp suggest, with a pandemic outside our windows and the world at our fingertips. Most of "Kimi" unfolds in the spacious Seattle loft that Angela calls home, though we soon see that it has also become her gym, her workspace and her permanent refuge.
Like the heroine of last year's misbegotten "The Woman in the Window" and many a shut-in protagonist before her, Angela is agoraphobic, an anxiety disorder she says she'd gotten a handle on until COVID-19 lockdown set in. Now she's content never to leave her almost entirely Kimi-run apartment, outsourcing menial tasks to an inanimate hub that records her every data point and keeps her under 24-7 digital surveillance.
