If you’re even remotely online, countless facets of your life are observed and cataloged all the time. It happens via the technology we use every day, the resulting data sold or otherwise disseminated on a wide scale. At one point, maybe, these statements would have sounded paranoid. Now? Not so much. At the very least, we have our suspicions. We see mysteriously relevant ads pop up around us, informing us about things tangentially related to other things that we’ve either searched or we’ve talked about near devices equipped with microphones. We put tape over laptop webcams because it’s the only way to be sure, and then we carry on. Like the low, dull hum of fluorescent lighting, the death of privacy is background noise. We traded it for convenience, and we do our best not to think about it. At the time of this writing, we greet allegations that the CIA collects our data in droves with a lot of jokey shrugs of absolute non-surprise.

The pitch for the Siri-like, Alexa-esque AI helper that gives Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi its title, then, is that it’s up front about people listening. Hell, it’s a selling point. It’s totally consistent with our current experience of so much technology: the impersonal qualities of automation and The Algorithm now irritate us, so the human touch can now be marketed as the alternative. Any miscommunications with a Kimi are flagged for reinterpretation by a flesh-and-blood person, who codes in the proper response response to help the machine learn. One such worker is Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz), who lives alone in her enormous apartment with her blue hair, her Kimi, and her agoraphobia, which had improved until COVID-19 reared its ugly little head. Working from home, she puts on her noise-canceling headphones and listens to the flagged missives assigned to her digital queue: the fact that “Me” is a Taylor Swift song, the definition of “peckerwood.”

In my head, I can picture the version of Kimi from some other era and likely from some other filmmaker, where the AI becomes self-aware or it becomes manipulated by a hacker or maybe it even gets possessed by an evil spirit. But here, the most antagonistic forces are human, using what might otherwise be “ordinary” functions of this technology for nefarious ends. It is a tool, and that tool is inadvertently used to record an assault that finds its way into Angela’s feed. There is no misuse or perversion of function here; the machine works as intended.

Listen Closely

In contrast to analog thrillers of the past, there’s little doubt about what Angela has heard. She just has to prove it. Her initial odyssey is through corporate red tape, slowed down by supervisors who think it’ll be easier to just delete the data and higher-ups who try to put her at ease with all the right words but whose primary function is to protect the company. Eventually, there’s good old-fashioned fleeing from henchmen out to silence Angela permanently, all done in jittery handheld to contrast the more stable camerawork of her apartment comfort zone.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of how the film portrays agoraphobia, but it does become much less of an obstacle as the story goes on. And before that, it’s very much a typically glamorized, high-functioning depiction of mental illness that’s prickly but not too alienating of audience sympathies, easily mistaken for a passing eccentricity. Angela’s (again, enormous) apartment is very clean, because obsessive cleanliness is a convenient shorthand for stories about mental illness. It’s decidedly on the mild end of the “weird” spectrum, a socially acceptable oddness because its end result is perfectly pleasant — who doesn’t want a clean apartment?

But there is, still, a kernel of genuine feeling here: Angela’s friends and family can’t help but come across as a little fed up, having run out of ways to rephrase the same platitudes. They’re exasperated at the fact that she can’t be fixed, resigned to the idea that this is just how she’s going to be. Angela will continue to be a shut-in, will continue to make that strange little motion to dry after her hands after sanitizing them. When she goes outside, she tenses up and her shoulders arch. Her arms don’t move when she walks, as though she winds herself so tight in order to venture out of her apartment that they’re functionally glued to her sides while the camera frames her at dizzying angles.

There are a lot of things you can get away with when your movie is 89 minutes, a lot of shorthands. Hollywood mental illness is one, and Angela’s apparent naïveté is another: you don’t get the impression that a Kimi’s vulnerabilities should be news to her. We want to follow characters who are The Best in some field, but a film needs to provide information for an audience that probably lacks the expertise. Angela’s naïveté, maybe, is the price of avoiding some POV audience surrogate who responds to tech jargon with, “Now tell me in English.” It’s understandable, though it contributes to the slight dissolution of the film’s credibility, the suspicion that its big ideas are all but incidental. Its crowd-pleasing instincts take you out of the story a little, never quite able to co-exist.

Kimi

Chekhov’s Kombucha

And that vague insincerity is a shame, because the best thing about Kimi is that it feels so unabashedly modern. The nostalgia industrial complex pumps out a lot of homages, and while Kimi is plainly the work of someone who wore out tapes of The Conversation and Rear Window, it never leans on reference to move along. It is not a wistful throwback to a time when stories didn’t have to think about what to do with the cell phones. It is, instead a film of uncommon relevance that seamlessly folds in threads of gentrification and tech overreach, its placement at some ambiguous point in the COVID-19 pandemic only augmenting its sense of modernity. The corporate roadblocks made me think of The Assistant, which follows a woman as she attempts to report sexual harassment within a film executive’s company.

Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp clearly miss this style of thriller, and relish all the updates they can make to the formula. The script has a sense of urgency that’s at once propulsive and low-key, never quite teetering into over-the-top stakes. The relevance of this conflict is allowed to exist on a smaller scale, despite the clear repercussions it can and does have on a larger one. But you get the sense that they miss it a little too much; Kimi zips along a little too cutely, eagerly seeding its later “aha!” payoffs to a degree that approaches parody, like opening up the fridge to discover Anton Chekhov’s name on everything. Every little detail is arranged so tidily that it clangs awkwardly against the attempted grounded now-ness of the setting; there were protests during COVID, so it follows that protesters must play a role in one escape scene.

The world of Kimi turns fully artificial, blunting the edge of its relevance in the process. It’s a film that is smart in a lot of the places it really needs to be smart but also so self-consciously clever that it fails to weaponize that cleverness, to use it to bury the real point under your skin. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine: they’re great fun to look at and think about but you’d never actually use them for anything.