Kimi (2022)
Review of Kimi (2022), directed by Steven Soderbergh
I originally reviewed Kimi over for Movieweb, so if you want to read my quote-on-quote professional review, you can find it there here. Kimi was one of those movies I just happened to stumble upon randomly, and it was at a particular time when I was hunting down a movie or television show to review next. I watched this directly after The Fallout, so perhaps I was asking for a healthy dose of realistic movies. Kimi is available to stream on HBO Max, as it’s an exclusive of the platform. I have a lot of thoughts about this movie, so let’s dive into this!
Zoe Kravitz, fresh on her run of Catwoman in The Batman, stars as an anxious tech worker who, during the COVI-19 pandemic, discovers a deadly secret.
Zoe Kravitz stars as Angela Childs, an anxious tech worker who doesn’t leave her massive Seattle apartment. It’s set during the COVID-19 pandemic, so this makes sense, but Angela’s mental health problems literally don’t let her leave the apartment.
At the very beginning, we see her trying to swirl up a romance with a nearby apartment neighbor, but when he asks her to come outside, she blows him off because she literally can’t do it. He is patient but exasperated with her. but this will eventually reach a boiling point.
Angela’s job is to monitor voice recordings for a company through something called Kimi. Kimi is essentially an Alexa that you can buy through Amazon, or many of the other tech guides you can buy nowadays.
Her specific task is to make sure and filter out anything that could effect the machine’s performance, but when she opens one clip, she discovers a woman being murdered in the background. When she informs her boss, he acts like he doesn’t care and tells her to delete the file, but she eventually wrestles out a higher-up’s name that she should contact about it.
This then leads her to illegally contacting her friend abroad, who gets her the developer code to discover who exactly the Kimi belonged to. At first, we see the only threat to Angela’s well-being is herself, as she can’t leave her apartment. When the time comes to go outside and meet the company official she contacted, the world seems too bright, too full, too overwhelming. That’s when everything really starts to hit the fan, as the company has a scan of Angela’s eyes to let her in.
As she sits with the sympathetic official, she discovers that the company knows too much about her—things she didn’t consent to them knowing. The official gaslights her about the situation, saying that she must not be mentally fit because of her previous medical history, or that because she was traumatized through assault she acts this way. The official leaves, but as Angela spots men in suits trying to subdue her approaching, she flees.
She is then tracked through her phone, and is almost pulled into a black van during a protest. The protestors are fighting against Seattle’s newest homeless laws, but here they are helping her get out of this situation. Angela does get caught, and we discover one of her many real-life stalkers (a guy in the apartment across from her) tries to get to her rescue.
The entire reason Angela is in this massive pile of issues is because the woman murdered in the livestream knew that the person who sent assailants against her was doing dirty business.
He worked for the same company as Angela, but just is very high up on the totem pole, so this delves into territory about exploitation and who can operate between the realms of legality and what isn’t legal.
Angela is the mundane human who just found out about all of this, and she’s supposed to be more relatable because she can’t muster the courage to go outside.
There’s also the commentary about technology and how dangerous it actually is. It’s always listening, although Kimi picked up the recording because the woman told her to, and it can be easily used against you whether you know it or not. The businessman probably didn’t realize that the woman recorded what she did until Angela discovered it, and when she, the ordinary citizen with a moral compass, discovers it, she, too, becomes a target.
The company has been scanning her eyes in meetings to use for passcodes, used technology to access even the most private information, and tracks her using her cellphone. That’s where the movie is absolutely terrifying for me. Technology can seem like an ally, but it’s such a double-edged sword in all of our lives when used by the people who have malice. Absolutely horrifying, especially when realizing Angela is a young black woman being affected by all of this.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a claustrophobic film, one that makes you feel like you’re being watched at all times. And perhaps you are being listened to at this very moment, and that’s the ugliest part of the movie along with the fact that people will weaponize tech.
Lots of commentary about class and race here, as Angela is not a white woman, and no one truly tries to help her outside of a stalker and a bunch of protestors. As a film in all, I didn’t care for it as much. It was interesting because of how it depicts society, but not for its actual plot. I could see something like this coming from a mile away in terms of twists and the screenplay.
