Kimi (film)

"Ah, this is Romania. MeToo is like 50 years away."

"And, trust me, I know bad. I used to moderate for Facebook."

"If you think youve seen this movie, you have and you havent. "KIMI" self-consciously draws from an assortment of cinematic referents, including obvious touchstones like "Rear Window" and woman-in-peril-at-home thrillers like "."

"In a sleek 89 minutes, writer David Koepp (whose similarly contained thriller Panic Room was notably watched by Soderbergh twice last year) keeps things refreshingly simple and stringently devoid of any extraneous padding. Its no surprise, after an opening tease concerning the financial specifics of the company behind Kimi, that theres a conspiracy to unravel but it unravels with a quick ease, an age-old tale of the hero who saw too much and the villain who wants to keep them quiet. We know where films like this tend to go, and Kimi is light on genuine surprise, but Koepp and Soderbergh keep most of it grounded, avoiding the clumsy narrative leaps these films often resort to, making so much of it feel awfully credible."

"Only now, at a time of slow-motion crisis in the industry (will audiences come back to theaters?) and seriously over-inflated budgets, Soderberghs latest little movie, the nimble and sinister cyber-age corporate thriller "Kimi," plays as an object lesson in showing us a way forward. Its a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more. Its also an art-suspense pastiche thats clever enough to hook you. More than half the film is set in a spacious, second-floor renovated industrial loft condo in Seattle, where Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), a waifish millennial in a wavy bob of blue hair, stares out her window, taking in the late-morning sun as she checks out the neighbors in the apartment building across the street (a couple of them look back)."

"Crucially, Kravitzs performance isnt overly concerned with coming across as likeable. Shes short with people. A little cold, sometimes. "Covid was a little bit of a setback," she admits, shrugging off her trauma as if it were just another daily toil. Without the exhausting mantle of self-prescribed importance, Kimi has successfully captured how the pandemic, for many, has felt like watching an invisible hand slowly chip away at their lives. Sitting all day on Zoom and yet feeling lonelier than ever is an exhausting experience."

"Alex Dobrenko as Darius Popescu"

"At a time when Facebook guru Mark Zuckerbergs ambivalence about privacy issues and his ambitious Metaverse plans have cast him in a dubious light, it feels appropriate to make a villain out of a tech conglomerate CEO eyeing a squillion-dollar personal profit from an IPO. And its a sly inside joke to cast neo-illusionist Derek DelGaudio in the role of Amygdala Corporation chief Bradley Hasling, taking his company public on the strength of a virtual assistant called Kimi."

"Shes not the only one listening"

"Ruthless and precise, Steven Soderberghs "KIMI" is a timely commentary on isolation and intrusion. Anchored by a striking performance from Zoë Kravitz, it sees the expert craftsman working with genre again, like how he did in "Side Effects" and "Unsane," taking a classic concept right out of "Rear Window" or "Blow Out" and making it current to the era of Covid-19 and Alexa."

"Kimis obvious inspirations include Rear Window (when it comes to the homebound Angela’s relationship to the wall of windows outside) and Blow Out (in its treatment of the audio evidence and the conspiratorial forces she stumbles onto). Its Hitchcockian aspirations are further signaled by the lush score from Cliff Martinez, which is deliberately out of step with the sleek, tech-centric setting."

"The nexus of tech and crime in "Kimi" packs a personal and a collective outrage at the ways in which tech companies have abandoned their civic responsibility and allowed, even fostered, propaganda—whether anti-vax or conspiracy-theorist or racist or misogynistic or anti-Semitic or xenophobic—that has got people killed. The depraved indifference in the name of stock prices finds its symbol in Kimi—not only in the way its managed but also in its seemingly innocent domestic presence. The blatant but forceful metaphorical condensation of world-spanning power in a conical gizmo energizes Soderberghs direction throughout; it appears inseparable from the physicality and the visual intensity that distinguish the movie from more routine storytelling."