Subconsciously, I must have wanted this. Clearly, my inner brain said, “what we want now is to see the plot we saw last week but with that other actress we saw last week. Last week, I saw The Batman, a movie with one only one female: Zoë Kravitz, and last week I also saw The Woman in the Window, where the plot revolved around Amy Adams’ agoraphobia. So, this week, Amy Adams plays The Batman. Wait Not right. I mean, this week Zoë Kravitz suffers from plot-defining agoraphobia in Kimi.
Kimi has a lot more sympathy for agoraphobes than The Woman in the Window. We understand the POV of Angela (Kravitz) without questioning her sanity. You wouldn’t think this would be important, but it seems our culture spends a lot of time and energy pretending that introversion is a mental disorder. Agoraphobes make introverts look like game show hosts. So when we see Angela, a woman who has built her entire life around not leaving her apartment, we will naturally assume something is wrong.
And something is wrong, but Kimi does a much better job of separating why Angela won’t go outside (a mild personality disorder) from a true mental disorder. Ain’t nothin’ permanently wrong with Angela; for now, she just hates going outside.
Aiding Angela’s non-clashes is Kimi. Think Siri or Alexa. Same damn thing. Angela is a trouble-shooter for Amygdala (think Apple or Amazon). Her job is to listen to Kimi voice-response fails and adjust appropriately so Kimi won’t make the same mistake twice. If you’re ever said aloud, “NO! DAMMIT, SIRI, YOU PIECE OF S***! THAT’S NOT WHAT I SAID/MEANT!” well, believe it or not, there are people who are paid to correct those problems. Some of them make enough money so that they never have to leave their apartments.
Hence, Angela’s pretty face and funky blue hair are wasted on everybody except her mom (Robin Givens) with
whom she facetimes, the neighbor who spies on her, and the neighbor who doesn’t because he doesn’t need to; she invites him over (Byron Bowers).
Turns out Angela is a bit of a whiz at audio, so when she hears something NOTRIGHT on her Kimi-splainin’ tapes, the film becomes The Conversation. Of course, The Conversation already exists so there might not have been a need for this film, but maybe it’s neat to think about Gene Hackman as younger and hotter and not Gene Hackman. Besides, this film is set-up as a Rear Window homage when it suddenly becomes a Conversation homage. And the whole point is that this is a problem that will force Angela to leave her apartment … which Angela really, really, really doesn’t want to do.
Kimi wandered for a bit establishing who Angela was and what she was all about until it finally got down to business … and when it did, it threw a bunch of things we knew right out the window. I feel like Act I was entirely an exercise in getting us to like Angela so maybe we’ll be concerned for what happens to her. When the film picked up in intensity, we’re riveted to the screen, but almost everything we learned in the first half of the film becomes completely irrelevant. Kimi is neither a wonderful character study, nor a barn-burner, but I did like it better than its immediate and obvious comparison, The Woman in the Window.
Shout out to Derek DelGaudio who had the small, thankless role of Amygdala CEO Bradley Halsing. Was his work spectacular? No. Was it memorable? Also, no. But I just wanted to give more attention to DelGuadio’s philosophical illusionist stand-up In & of Itself. Kimi is not the best use of his talents, but he has definitely earned more screen time.
That Alexa-like voice that you need
Is the subject of a new thriller, indeed
The question may weary
But if the film were called “Siri”
Would it automatically play in my feed?
Rated R, 89 Minutes
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Genre: Psst…Amazon is evil. Pass it on.
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Agoraphobes
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Authoritarians
