Kimi: A Shallow Look at Corporate Surveillance

In the modern era, a movie that clocks in at under two hours is an anomaly. The sub-two-hour runtime is a promise to the audience that the movie will deliver a cohesive narrative that is emotionally fulfilling to the viewer. Kimi goes under this by a half hour, clocking in at an hour and a half but the problem is the movie lacks any substantial depth and does not explore the interesting concepts that it introduces.

Kimi tells the story of Angela who works from home for Amygdala, a company that makes smart speaker named Kimi that is akin to Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home. Angela’s job is to listen to times that Kimi misunderstands people and fix the coding errors that led to that mistake. In one of the audio files, she discovers evidence of a violent sexual assault and sets out to get the victim help and report the crime to officials. All this happens in the foreground while the Covid-19 pandemic and large-scale protests of Seattle’s new homelessness laws form the subtext of the movie.

Part of the problem with the movie is that, much like last year’s Malignant, the fact that the person who commits the crime in the movie works for Amygdala in a large capacity is revealed in the first five minutes. The problem with this is that the viewer now knows something that the lead in the movie does not and, in the case of Kimi, it does not become information that Angela knows overtly until the closing minutes. If that’s the case, there is a way to exposit information about the fact that the head of the company is the one who committed the crime and is going to great lengths to cover it up without it being force fed in the first five minutes.

The other problem is that there are a lot of deep emotional problems that Angela is dealing with, but this is only ever dealt with on a very superficial level. She is agoraphobic after being sexually assaulted herself, but that being the cause of the agoraphobia is mentioned once and it is in passing. Zoe Kravitz does a great job in the role, selling the anxiety and fear that comes with someone who went through what Angela did while still having to live a life. That said, once the audience finds out what happened to Angela explicitly (or as explicitly as the movie needs it to be), it makes the way she is treated by her mother and her therapist seem all the more callus.

It is an interesting watch, and the combination of Steven Soderbergh’s direction and Zoe Kravitz’s performance make the movie worth the time, it just does not have too much to say. Fundamentally the core of the story is about the prevalence of smart devices but it appears that the only “downside” that the movie presents to them is that maybe someone who commits a violent crime in earshot of one won’t get away with it. This gets coupled with a second half that is mostly a montage of Zoe Kravitz running away from hitmen and a climax that feels like it comes directly from Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, it does take away the biting commentary that seems like it could be just below the surface. For what it is though, it is a perfectly serviceable use of an hour and a half.

Final Rating: 7.5/10