One of the hardest working filmmakers is back -again-. After last year’s No Sudden Move, a wonderful throwback to the classic noirs, Steven Soderbergh returns with KIMI, a film focused on an agoraphobic technician -played by Zoë Kravitz- who spends her days in her apartment watching her neighbours and reviewing recordings of unknown users of an Alexa-like assistant named KIMI with the purpose of providing a more human interaction. Her existence is altered when she inadvertently discovers what appears to be a crime on a recording.  

It is clear from the plot that KIMI is inspired by films like Blowup, The Conversation, Blow Out, and Rear Window. However, David Koepp is intelligent enough to be respectful with the films he has been influenced by, and thus has written a script that does not fail to homage the classics. There are neither posters of any film by Hitchcock, Antonioni, De Palma or Coppola hanging in the background, nor throwaway references as a nod to the cinephiles. Instead, the script uses those films as a solid ground to build upon and updates them for a new audience who, sadly, might not be familiar with them.

In this way Koepp has also paid homage to those old-fashioned conspiracy thrillers that were popular decades ago, but, in the process, he has brought them up to date. Gone are the days of being surprised by corruption. Nowadays we do not raise an eyebrow every time we learn that this or that politician is crooked. We have confirmed that evil corporations rule in the shadows. We have become used to it. We know we are being watched and heard at all times, except that, this time it is not -only- by a man with a camera hiding in his apartment. The issue is that we know somebody is on the other side, paying attention. The difference is that we just do not care – and in case we forget it, we will always have KIMI politely saying “I’m here”.

As usual, Soderbergh proves once again that it must be extremely difficult for him to make a bad film. He wastes no time in order to introduce us to a reality we immediately identify, basically because it is our own -i.e., people in sweatpants inside their flats spending their days in front of a screen, going out with masks and constantly cleaning their hands-. With a straightforward and unobtrusive way to direct -together with a fantastic sound design and an immersive soundtrack by frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez-, we are put in the daily grind of a woman who is trapped by her past trauma and is unable to confront what is outside her home.

However, once she discovers the audio of the crime and the film quickly starts to pick up the pace -although it becomes a tad more conventional in the process-, Soderbergh confidently and abruptly shifts gears from one section to another, making us feel trapped as soon as Angela -Kravitz- opens her door and steps outside of her flat. The frenetic edit -by Soderbergh himself-, together with the number of Dutch angles in the second part of the film might break some necks, but they magnificently make you feel the same anxiety that is going through our lead character.

Thanks to a concise and self-aware script by Koepp, a solid performance by Kravitz, and Soderbergh’s minimalist -yet masterful- approach to filmmaking, KIMI is not only a highly watchable homage to some of the most influential classics of the past century, but also an update which deals with the increasing disappearance of our privacy.