Kimi (2022)

February 17, 2022 7:51 AM

A tech worker with agoraphobia discovers recorded evidence of a violent crime, but is met with resistance when she tries to report it. Seeking justice, she must do the thing she fears the most: she must leave her apartment.

The latest Steven Soderbergh film on HBOMax finds him updating the 1970s paranoid thriller with today's technological surveillance devices and covid isolation. Adds Blow-Up, Blow-Out, The Conversation and maybe The Parallax View into a pot and boils it down to a tight 90s minutes.

posted by octothorpe (13 comments total)

MILD SPOILERS:

I thought this was pretty well done. Maybe I missed some small detail, but it seemed a pretty giant coincidence that the main character happened upon her Big Boss' recording of his crime. Other than that, I loved that it was short and to the point. Zero padding. Worth a watch.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:41 AM on February 17, 2022

It was a misunderstood command so someone working for the company had to hear it.
posted by Stanczyk at 9:10 AM on February 17, 2022

I really liked it too. Kravitz is fantastic in it. I also empathize with how it used COVID to amplify Angela's agoraphobia. I could really relate to that.
posted by Stanczyk at 9:13 AM on February 17, 2022

I loved it but it was one of my favorite directors working in one of my favorite genres so it was sort of a given. I forgot to mention Vertigo and Rear Window as influences too and any friend of those films is a friend of mine. I wouldn't say that it's as good as those but it's a fun exercise in updating those tropes into our tech-infested, pandemic present.
posted by octothorpe at 9:38 AM on February 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also felt like the last sequence had a bit of Wait Until Dark in there.

I joked this movie is good if you've never seen a movie before. While that's not completely fair, it is definitely drawing on its influences, but it does that well. It has pretty predictable beats but I was very much entertained. Kravitz is always fun to watch and I'm glad it was only 90 minutes. It just kept pushing forward without stopping. I appreciated that.
posted by edencosmic at 11:35 AM on February 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

It was well-done because it was Soderbergh, but it was incredibly familiar and predictable.

I don't think it was a mistaken command; I think there was a bit in the script about it being manually flagged and this was perhaps the result of the victim telling Kimi to "record"?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:41 AM on February 18, 2022

What if Steven Soderbergh, but Luc Besson?

Maybe add a little Michael Clayton?

I enjoyed it!
posted by nicwolff at 11:42 AM on February 18, 2022

I felt like this was the first time I had seen some of that pandemic stuff in a movie. Like the CEO’s zoom setup. Being in public places with some people wearing masks and others not. Even the tech support guy in Eastern Europe rang incredibly true to me.
posted by jeoc at 7:46 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed a lot of this. Her leaving to go to the office and that whole scene up until the abduction was just great. There were a lot of small touches that were done well, something that isn't always the case.

That said, I feel like her switch at the end to ruthless killer was a bit out of left field. I've no problem with John Wick or Atomic Blonde movies, but don't super believe the sudden transition with no support. Her headshotting one mook then finishing off the last one with no emotion was badass, but not exactly in character.
posted by Carillon at 11:29 PM on February 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

This was fun. The only thing I didn’t like was the sudden transition to 3-stooges level incompetence by the goons at the end.

It was fun to see downtown Seattle in a movie. The route of the chase scene made sense. There were probably even some real life Alexa workers in the background, since that’s real-life Amazon territory.

All told, a pretty good long-form advertisement for cordless nail guns.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:21 AM on February 19, 2022 [6 favorites]

The killing spree at the end was maybe a little bit foreshadowed by the “I was assaulted but they ended putting me on trial” bit?

I liked it, it felt like a film from an earlier time with the short run time and no extra stuff.
posted by boogieboy at 11:09 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Exactly. I just watched Fuller's Pickup on South Street which manages to fit a gripping story with at least four well-fleshed out characters into all of 80 minutes. Not that every film should be that short but not every film needs to be a butt-numbing three hours either. I feel like Hollywood has lost the ability to tell stories economically.
posted by octothorpe at 11:00 AM on February 24, 2022

I feel like it's cruel to be critical of this movie. It's fun enough, but it's pretty slight.

It's fun seeing Kravitz going around as a teal-and-orange gnome.
posted by fleacircus at 9:43 PM on March 30, 2022