Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Here we are with Steven Soderbergh again, offering his fourth straight-to-streaming film in as many years. Okay, they weren’t quite all straight-to-streaming, although they’re certainly trending that way: The Laundromat was streaming less than a month after a brief theatrical release in late September 2019; Let Them All Talk was released straight to HBO Max in December 2020; No Sudden Move was released on HBO Max in July 2021; and now we’ve got Kimi, also on HBO Max as of yesterday (February 11). It would be tempting to say Soderbergh is trending this way due to the rippling effects of the pandemic on the film industry—except that the pandemic only accelerated industry changes that began well before it, and considering that 2019 streaming release, it would seem Soderbergh saw the writing on the wall well before any of us had any idea Covid was coming. One wonders whether he’ll make movies for theaters ever again. His next project is Magic Mike’s Last Dance, so, who knows?

Whatever the case, this guy sure as shit keeps busy. He clearly isn’t obsessed with making “great cinema,” either, opting instead for steady work making competent offerings on an annual basis. He just likes making movies.

And, to his credit, he’s capable of adapting. In the case of Kimi, he has finally made a movie that directly acknowledges the pandemic, with its central character, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), being an agoraphobic tech worker who works from home, having had made some progress but noting that the pandemic cause a relapse of sorts. She has an ongoing, very socially distanced relationship with a man in the building across the street (Byron Bowers)—having established a connection during lockdown—as well as a mysterious man on another floor we regularly see looking her way. His very existence in the movie means he will become a key figure in the plot eventually, and when that inevitably happens, it’s in an unexpected way.

A bit of fun for the locals where I live: Kimi is set in Seattle. Interiors mostly shot in Los Angeles, but there are plenty of exterior scenes—especially once Angela is given no choice but to leave her apartment. I got taken out of the story momentarily when Angela takes a light rail train from International District Station to an office building by the grain silos on the waterfront. Light rail doesn’t go there! Of course, no one outside of Seattle will know that or care. And it was still a minor thrill to see Sound Transit get such prominent, onscreen product placement.

Anyway, you might be wondering who the hell Kimi is. It’s more of a what, actually: it’s a virtual assistant, like Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Siri. Angela works the error logs of voice commands that didn’t work and resolves or corrects them, and then runs across one which sounds as though a murder may have been recorded. Angela looks into it, and peril ensues.

Clearly Kimi shares a lot of its DNA with Alfred Kitchcock’s Rear Window, but it’s just different enough for that not to be to its detriment. The virtual assistant element is a nice twist for the modern age, and Angela’s relapse into agoraphobia provides a logical context wherein the pandemic also exists. Kimi was filmed in the spring of 2021, just after the peak of vaccination drives, when we were headed into a brief period of relaxed mitigation measures. This allows the production to feature characters here and there with masks on, but most of the time people are going around maskless. There’s one scene in downtown Seattle that is unusually crowded, but whatever, it’s a movie. I enjoyed spying Seattle landmarks and locations in these scenes.

One of the bigger surprises is Derek DelGaudio, previously seen as the jaw dropping illusionist in last year’s Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (that one streaming on Hulu), as Kimi’s villain. He actually only gets a few scenes, and anyone carrying a threat or intent of violence would qualify as his henchman. DelGaudio plays Bradley Hasling, the creator of the Kimi virtual assistant. The well constructed script draws connections between all these characters that, while they are contrivances, are also the hallmarks of effective storytelling. Kimi starts off a bit slow, much of the story confined to Angela’s apartment. But, the world broadens a bit when her need to report what she heard on the recording forces her decision to leave home, and then for the last third or so of the film, things get much more exciting as the action and suspense ramps up.

There’s also a sprinkling of humorous moments here and there that are a nice touch. Kimi frankly feels a little like a movie made for streaming rathe than theatrical release, but it serves its purpose. It’s a mid-level Soderbergh offering, and at a cool 89 minutes in length, it makes for a perfectly good diversion at home over the weekend.

*Check it out, Zoë Kravitz at a Seattle bus stop!*

Overall: B