Premise: A customer service employee for an Alexa-like device hears a crime on a disputed recording that puts her in the center of a massive conspiracy.
How sure are we that Stephen Soderbergh isn’t behind COVID? Here me out. It feels like he’s been preparing for this his whole life with his career. He works cheap and quick, starting with Sex, Life, and Videotape back in the day. He’s experimented with cheap and guerilla filmmaking all the way back to Bubble in 2005. He’s been shooting films like Unsane and High Flying Bird on iPhones lately. Everything about Let Them All Talk feels like a COVID production except that it was filmed on a cruise ship. So, by the time he makes Kimi, you could convince me that he already had it planned exactly like this pre-March 2020.
The natural comparison in my mind is Locked Down: another COVID era thriller released on HBO Max by a prolific filmmaker. It’s not a perfect comparison. Locked Down was made at the height of COVID restrictions whereas Kimi was made when pretty much everything had opened back up. They have a similar sparseness though. I can’t imagine either film crew was large. They are light on production elements. Insignificant scoring. Production design is simple and the staging of shots not complex. The real difference between the movies is that Soderbergh knows how to make this kind of movie and Locked Down’s director, Doug Liman, doesn’t.
Kimi is a lean movie that knows it only has 90 minutes before the audience will start asking more questions. Zoe Kravitz is such a star in this. It’s crazy how comfortable on camera she is. Anytime I see her in something, she seems so unbothered by the fact that the camera is rolling. That doesn’t necessarily mean she has the charisma to lead a blockbuster or the chops to win a major award someday. It just means that if you put her on screen, she’s going to look like she’s a woman just living her life. That meshes perfectly with how Soderbergh likes to do things. I hope he gets her again for future films.
The conspiracy she uncovers is just intriguing and fleshed out enough to work. It reminded me a bit of The Conversation, which is a high compliment. I enjoyed this cast. A lot of familiar faces, not names. I don’t know if any of them have worked with Soderbergh before. I’d love to know the casting process that ended up with Rita Wilson on set for a day as an HR bureaucrat or David Wain to film a skype role as a dentist. In a lot of ways, this felt like when I was a kid building things with LEGO. I’d build a big castle, then I would try and figure out what I could build with all the extra pieces I had left. Kimi is a movie made out of the extra pieces. They found the locations they could rent for cheap and got whatever actors they could for days they weren’t busy and made a movie.
Had this movie been a minute longer, I would not have liked it as much. It’s the right length with the right cast. I had fun watching it. I appreciate how uncomplicated her rampage with the nail gun was, and the 911 call right after was funny. Soderbergh is really in his element here. It’s not his finest film, but it’s one of the entries that makes his filmography as fun as any director you’ll come across.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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