‘KIMI’ Review: Sure She’s Paranoid, but Something Really Is Out There
Soderbergh quickly plots the coordinates of Angela’s life, seamlessly in sync with Kravitz’s exact, sensitively managed efficiency and David Koepp’s intelligent, streamlined script. After an enigmatic prelude, the setting shifts to Angela’s loft, an area that’s without delay comfortably intimate and expansive sufficient that you may’t see all its darkish corners without delay. Even so, Angela appears comfortable and in management, even when the distinctive camerawork — which isn’t all the time tethered to her P.O.V. — suggests forces past her management. Like KIMI, the floaty, drifty (pushy, nosy) digital camera appears to have a thoughts of its personal.
Angela’s job is to resolve communication bugs in KIMI. She listens to recordings of the software program’s botched interactions with customers and corrects the glitches, an in any other case uneventful, routinized gig that’s upended when she thinks she hears a violent crime on one recording. She’s shaken, however as a result of Angela is extra complicated than she first appears, she will get busy. She chases clues, calls in favors. And she or he reaches out for assist from an everyday hookup (Byron Bowers), an obstreperous Romanian colleague (Alex Dobrenko) and a supervisor (an ideal, completely appalling Rita Wilson). Issues get bizarre, after which they get scary.
For those who suppose you’ve seen this film, you’ve and also you haven’t. “KIMI” self-consciously attracts from an assortment of cinematic referents, together with apparent touchstones like “Rear Window” and woman-in-peril-at-home thrillers like “Midnight Lace.” Koepp wrote probably the greatest modern takes on the home mousetrap subgenre, “Panic Room,” which was directed by Soderbergh’s buddy David Fincher. A shot of some dropped eyeglasses right here reads like a hat tip to the same picture in Fincher’s film, which in flip nods at Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Canines,” a far much less female-friendly trouble-at-home flick.
As Angela digs into the thriller of the recording, “KIMI” begins shifting right into a spookier register. In time, she is compelled to go away her house, an exit that liberates and terrifies her, and in addition frees up Soderbergh. (He shot and edited the film.) As soon as she really will get previous her entrance door, her physicality abruptly adjustments and so does the film’s visible type. She hunches her shoulders, bows her head and hugs the partitions, and the camerawork turns into emphatically expressionistic as Soderbergh pulls out all his tips, clearly having a blast. The digital camera swoops and races, and he deploys lengthy photographs and canted angles, isolating Angela within the body as she rushes right into a paranoid thriller à la “Blow-Up” and “The Dialog.”
