Steven Soderbergh’s newest film, 2022’s Kimi, is a kind of spiritual descendant from his acclaimed 2008 film, Contagion. The similarities are all-too on the nose; a global pandemic is going on, and paranoia and bureaucratic conspiracy are deeply at play here. We spend almost all of the film’s 89 minute runtime with Angela, a tech worker in central Seattle. The film is, for almost the majority of it, a chamber drama performed by one person, with short conversations interlaced occasionally for Angela to achieve social contact of some kind. It must be noted that Angela is coded to be autistic and is agoraphobic to the point of nearly fainting when she approaches her loft’s door to her building’s floor. Angela’s apartment, a spacious loft in the SODO district of Seattle (a neighborhood that has, in parts, become a gentrified haven for the kinds of folks that have one foot in tech work and another in their own hipsterisms) where she lives by herself. However, almost all of the key action takes place at their desk, wherein she works as a conversation refiner for her company’s home AI companions, which is highly akin to Amazon’s Siri; it is key to note that the company she works for is coded to be Amazon on multiple occasions. This is clear in the amount of money she makes, where she lives, her bureaucratic fever dream of immediate supervisors and other integrated departments which the company operates as.
In Kimi, Angela hears a stream of a conversation with the AI device the film is named after (more on that later) that she suspects is a violent attack on a woman that the appropriate authorities need to know about. She tries to bring this to her supervisors, but is stalked, gaslighted, and hunted by those trying to keep a dark secret about her company a secret. However, what exactly they are up against is never discussed until at the end, and disappointedly at that. This is my primary flaw with the film; the balance between the primary drama in the film and all of the exposition and still moments around it, and how they resolve the key conflict at hand.
Angela’s relationships with those around her are few and frayed. Over the course of the film we get to meet her mother, with whom she has a cold, distant, and yet almost daily conversation with, even if they may last less than two minutes at a time. Their relationship is perhaps the most tragic one in the film, and I would’ve certainly enjoyed to have seen more time between them. However, it must be said that she does not get close with anyone she interacts with in the film more than a neighbor from across the street, a busy yet genuinely handsome and amicable young public prosecutor. Their relationship is primarily physical, and yet there is genuine warmth between them. It is explained that they met through being neighbors whose windows face each other, a classically romantic notion wherein this feeling is dampered down considerably due to the social isolation and emotional murkiness that the pandemic has brought to metropolitan areas such as central Seattle. Their relationship occurred naturally, and their interactions are some of the few truly bright spots in her days. Finally, Angela has a womanizing, alcoholic fellow tech worker for her company she video chats with whenever she needs help or favors from him. She tells him repeatedly not to refer to her as “hotness”, which he consistently brushes aside. There’s little care from Angela about this man, and yet he is one of the few recurring people in her life. These characters, even her own mother, are not central to her life whatsoever; she is very comfortable living by herself, taking part in the day’s routine and work, being simply content in her space.
The technical aspects of the film are great and work wonderfully for what the film is trying to achieve, and that is simply springtime in Seattle in 2022. It feels claustrophobic and does have a certain vertigo to the cinematography that one rarely sees successfully done outside of the films of Hitchcock or Noe. The closest film that comes to mind to compare it to is the classic conspiracy drama Seconds (1966, dir. John Frankenheimer). I’m certain Kimi would make for an entrancing time at a theater, and yet, as it was produced in part by HBO Max, it works just fine on screens of all kinds. The cinematography works wonders for the film, and the set design is very clearly thought-out at length. Sound plays a very crucial part of the film, adding a noted cerebral element to the work. To put it simply, the film is a thoroughly good reminder of why Steven Soderbergh is one of the most consistent major directors working in Hollywood at the moment.
While I don’t want to give away any crucial spoilers in this review, I will say that how the conflict was resolved was satisfying in a sense, however it came abruptly and just did not provide as satisfying an ending as it could’ve been. My one issue with Soderbergh’s films that I’ve seen is the pacing of the writing, and it’s unfortunate to see that still be an issue this late into his career. Nonetheless, Kimi was a fun time that held my attention and brought me into a world and setting that felt all too real, and yet was just out of the understandable ordinary than usual that I might question if it did happen. I’ve walked by many of the locations in the film countless times as I’m originally from downtown Seattle, and I will hail this film as being one of the more culturally accurate films about the city I’ve ever seen. To put it bluntly, this is much more realistic and respectful of the city than most films that take place in Seattle are. For that alone I’d recommend the film, but I can’t bring myself to do that since the film has so much to offer and the experience of watching it only gets better with a rewatch.