A little more than a year ago, a movie, ‘Kimi’, arrived almost on the sly at HBO Max, which is worth recovering because it is among the platform’s juiciest exclusive products. It is written by David Koepp, one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing screenwriters (‘Mission: Impossible’ or Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’, among others), especially known for his collaboration with Spielberg, in films such as ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘War of the Worlds’.
Director Steven Soderbergh turns out to be the perfect director to put in images this script that has a lot to do with the film that Koepp wrote for David Fincher, ‘Panic Room’, and that the director of ‘Kimi’ acknowledged obsessively reviewing to plan this one. Indeed, this is another claustrophobic story that takes place almost entirely on a single stage.
In fact, claustrophobia is what Angela (played by a charismatic Zoë Kravitz, whom we remember giving life to Catwoman in ‘The Batman’), who works for a company that has launched Kimi, an Alexa-style smart speaker, suffers from. She checks error messages reported by users, and one day finds a message that could contain an assault. In the middle of a pandemic and due to his illness, he does not dare to take the message to his superiors.
And so, ‘Kimi’ balances between technothriller (thanks to his frenetic editing pulse, Soderbergh makes interesting the abundant scenes in which Angela is alone in front of her screens reviewing audios) and the most classic suspense (excellent and suffocating the sequence in which she decides to go down to the street). And all wrapped in a pertinent and sharp criticism of the loss of privacy that we sell at very low cost to corporations who do not care too much about people. An urban adventure, minimalist, feisty and rabid.