As a preamble to my Non-Professional Review, there may be spoilers within any review I publish.

Every time I think of my favorite directors, I forget about Steven Soderbergh. Not because I think poorly of him, but because he’s great at so many genres of film that I don’t associate him with any one type of movie in the same way I associate with, say Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott. I actually love about 16 of his movies and KIMI (2022) is the most recent one. KIMI is about Angela Childs, a tech worker at a newish tech company called Amygdala that produces an Alexa style smart home device called KIMI.

Angela, played perfectly by Zoë Kravitz, works by listening to audio streams of people having trouble with their KIMI device not understanding what they say. In other words, the KIMI is confused by the person’s request. Angela fixes the problem through coding. One day, she hears a disturbing clip and believes a sexual assault may have been committed against a woman. Angela starts investigating because she cares and has suffered an assault in her past.

As I watched, I was reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974) and Michael Mohan’s THE VOYEURS (2021). Two very different movies, yet both involve people spying on others and suspecting a crime’s been committed. All three are about listening and interpretation. These three films would make a good triple feature.

I enjoyed watching Zoë Kravitz portray a tricky character. Tricky in that her character can seem unlikeable, controlling, and rubs people the wrong way, but for reasons that have everything to do with her living with metal illness and past trauma from being assaulted at work. Her performance strongly reminded me of the character Smilla from the book and movie SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW in that Angela is a good person, trying to do the right thing while being the type of woman whose behavior frustrates many people in her life. Like, her agoraphobia is so strong that even when she suffers a very painful toothache, even her dentist can’t convince her to come into the office for an examination. Angela will not go and demands the dentist give her a prescript for antibiotics and painkillers. She would never smile and joke just to make you feel comfortable. Even her body language changes when she has to venture out of her apartment. She keeps her hoodie up, mask on, hunches forward, and walks stiffly. Her home is her safe space.

As an aside, I love it when staggeringly beautiful actress get to play some kind of “difficult” character. It’s rare. More often than not, gorgeous woman DON’T get to play difficult because they are reduced to the love interest of a man. It’s like men in the industry hate to see women doing anything other than be attractive. Angela draws clear boundaries and will enforce them. Her behavior frustrates her mom, her therapist, her dentist, her landlord, people she works with, and Terry (actor Byron Bowers) who she’s casually sexing. Do not cross her boundaries. Ever.

Back to the review. Angela discovers that it’s true, a woman was murdered and the KIMI recorded the audio. As she gets deeper into the mystery she learns the victim not only was sexually assaulted by an important Amygdala employee, the victim was threatening to expose the KIMI device is majorly flawed. The killers were two men who were hired by the rapist. Angela wants Amygdala to know the truth and help her contact the FBI, buuuuut there are millions of dollars at risk because Amygdala is planning on a stock launch (an Initial Public Offering). While she’s at Amygdala, Angela realizes she’s in danger when she notices two men coming for her.

At that point, Angela has to evade 2 hired killers. She tries to get to the local FBI office only to end up drugged by the killers who plan on returning Angela to her apartment because that is where they will kill her and make sure they take or destroy the evidence KIMI is flawed.

Another aside, I appreciated the detail of how Angela was drugged. She was shot in the leg by an umbrella which is similar to the real life case of Georgie Markov, a Bulgarian ex-patriot living in London who was murder by a Russian assassin using an umbrella that fired a tiny pellet containing ricin poison.

Angela manages to defeat the killers because she has a KIMI which she instructs to turn off the lights and play “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys at full volume as a distraction. She’s helped by Kevin, a man from the apartment across the street who’s been spying on her long enough he realized Angela is in trouble given that she ventured outside her apartment. In the end, Angela experiences have made her more comfortable leaving her apartment and she’s happily dating Terry. Angela even styles herself differently.

In conclusion, I recommend KIMI and I really love the final needle drop of Elastica’s “Connection.” It was released in 1995 and it warms my old heart. KIMI (2022) is rated R and the runtime is 1 hour 29 minutes.

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