Kimi

UK Release Date. 19 February 2022
Certification. 15

Running Time. 1 hour 29 mins
Director. Steven Soderbergh
Cast. Byron Bowers, Derek Del Gaudio, Zoë Kravitz, Devin Ratray, Rita Wilson.
Rating. 38%

Review.

Whilst initially an interesting premise, Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi is a superficial, sterile and unsatisfactory piece of work.

Zoë Kravitz stars as agoraphobic tech worker, Angela Childs, who hasn’t set foot outside her apartment since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Angela potentially discovers evidence of a violent crime while monitoring Kimi's data stream [for Kimi, read Alexa or Amazon Echo]. Her concerns are met with resistance from her employer, a fictional tech company, Amygdala.

Zoë Kravitz endeavours to develop a nervous, skittish and fragile character within the confines of a ridiculously short run time. The storyline is under-cooked, again seemingly constrained by the restrictive run time. At one point in the film, an Amygdala executive excuses herself from a conversation in her office and is never seen again!

There are obvious comparisons to be made with Steven Soderbergh’s earlier film, Unsane and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, but Kimi is essentially a reboot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the always online generation. Kimi embodies an exaggerated hypothesis that the technology designed to connect people through the pandemic may, in fact, increase our isolation and encourage agoraphobia in others.