Steven Soderbergh’s ‘KIMI’ is Timely and Minimalist COVID-era Gem [Review]

There’s no doubt Steven Soderbergh tried to make a movie for our times with “KIMI.” This is a tightly-plotted film, filled with the isolation grimness of the COVID-era. And yet, what fun it is to revel in Soderbergh’s 21st century take on “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation.”

Set during the pandemic, an ever-playful Zoë Kravitz is Angela, an agoraphobic tech worker who discovers recorded evidence of a violent crime via someone’s SIRI-like device called KIMI. When she reports the crime to her superiors, she’s met with resistance. Why? She investigates deeper and finds a conspiracy involving a multinational company that forces her to do the unthinkable: leave her apartment.

This relevant depiction of surveillance, isolation and mental health in the COVID-19 era has Soderbergh playfully toying with our current anxieties. On its surface, it might not seem like such a heavy statement from a filmmaker who keeps leap-frogging from genre to genre with every film, but once you strip the layers off of this 89-minute film, there’s a lot to chew on.

Angela’s fears are ours. It’s not just the pandemic either, it’s also the fact that her job is to spy on people’s conversations, find the flaws of KIMI and fix them. She lives, just like we do, in a mass-surveillance society and doesn’t realize it until those same walls end up closing in on her.

Her lack of interaction, whether due to the virus or her mental health issues, represent the fears of our current society. There’s suspense just in Angela leaving her trendy Seattle apartment, taking the stairs, and avoiding large crowds outdoors. A kind of open-air claustrophobia that feels all-too reminiscent of today’s world.

With the help of writer David Koepp, Soderbergh paints his scathing indictment of 21st century bureaucracy, a world with endless personal data stream being possessed by powerful entities, via immaculately-delivered action set-pieces. The same Soderbergh of “Haywire” is on full display here. He’s aided by Kravitz’s smartly empathetic performance. [B+]