Steven Soderbergh is very good at making tight little thrillers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In his Kimi, Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a Seattle techie living and working in her loft apartment during the COVID lockdown, where she and the loft apartment dwellers across the street watch each other being locked down. But she’s not really trapped in her apartment by public health protocols, which have eased – she’s agoraphobic.
Angela works for a big, sinister tech firm that harvesting way too much private information from each of us and that is the basis for the paranoid facet of this paranoid thriller. She believes that she has heard a violent crime, as in an audio version of Rear Window. Now she knows too much, and she’s in danger.
Kimi is an okay paranoid thriller until the finale, when it turns into a superb action movie. It turns out that the tiny, sniveling Angela has some commando resourcefulness in her. The final set piece is like Wait Until Dark on steroids – very tight, very imaginative and very entertaining.
Kimi is streaming on HBO MAX.
