Kimi review – Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller is prescient and never opportunistic

Zoom-set horror Host, dystopian thriller Songbird, heist caper Locked Down, rom-com 7 Days. To varying levels of taste and success, many filmmakers have already pivoted to stories involving the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in a variety of genres. But Kimi, Steven Soderbergh’s sharp, riveting and pint-sized offering, may be the first to actually comment on the effects of the pandemic in a way that doesn’t feel crass.

Perhaps Kimi’s success lies in the fact that it’s not a film about the pandemic, merely a story in which the pandemic colours the edges of our protagonist’s world. It stars an excellent Zoë Kravitz as Angela Childs, a tech worker who fixes bugs for an Alexa-style virtual assistant software called “Kimi” that uses human monitoring to hone its accuracy. While before the pandemic she was living with mental health issues following an assault, lockdown has only exacerbated her agoraphobia and anxiety, leaving her virtually housebound.

We watch as she meticulously checks and rechecks her apartment before attempting to leave the house, never quite able to make it past the stage where the key goes into the door. But eventually she does leave, propelled into action by a disturbing Kimi recording. Faced with bureaucratic inaction (with a chilling Rita Wilson cameo) and sensing a darker corporate secret in the ether, Angela takes to the streets to try and seek justice for the anonymous victim.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that Soderbergh has made seven films in the past five years. His “streaming era” has been under-marketed and unappreciated, a far cry from his household-name days of Out of Sight, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven. Despite this, Kimi is a film perfectly suited to home streaming, and that’s by no means an insult – merely that its preoccupation with confinement and isolation feels all the more meaningful when watched in view of your timeworn possessions.

Like many Soderbergh films, Kimi is critical of the capitalistic structures and corporate greed that routinely poison the human condition. And as a plucky young woman unearthing corruption against the odds à la Erin Brockovich, Kravitz thrives in centring this vision within the anxiety-prone Millennial mindset. Disorienting camera angles and fretful sound design contribute to both Angela and the audience’s unease. Little surprise, too, that in 1989 Soderbergh named Francis Ford Coppola’s meticulously soundscaped paranoia thriller The Conversation as one of his favourite films; Kimi plays out as if Gene Hackman had Gen-Z bangs.

Some of the plot requires a suspension of disbelief, but Kravitz herself is so damn convincing that you’re willing to forgive some illogical or improbable events. The absurdity of lockdown, however, is all-too accurate, whether it’s unacknowledged children screaming in the background of a colleague’s zoom call or a dentist appointment conducted via video. Soderbergh uses the situation as a way to reflect how easily falsified reality can be, how all-too-ready we are as a society to rely on technologies that uncannily mimic and refract human behaviour. With an unshowy lightness, Kimi perfectly lays out the dangers of loneliness and isolation, and how the help and sense of community provided by perfect strangers can be game-changing and even life-saving.

In a sprightly 89 minutes, the one-two punch of Soderbergh’s engaging directorial style and Kravitz’s remarkable central performance makes Kimi a film that not only earns its usage of the pandemic as a metaphor, but resoundingly succeeds as a 21st century thriller.

Kimi is available to stream on Sky Cinema from 19 February.