Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: David Koepp
Cast: Zoe Kravitz, Erika Chistensen, Rita Wilson
Streaming on: Amazon Prime
Two years back, we were watching – or rewatching – Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) as the world went into a lockdown, deriving sadistic satisfaction from the film’s eerie prophecy. (It’s the closest we ever came to a doomsday movie turning real). Given his strike rate – at least one film every year, sometimes two – the director of such films as Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), Traffic (2000) and Magic Mike (2012), wasn’t going to sit out while an actual pandemic raged on. His No Sudden Move (2021) was shot during that time but is set in the 1950s; Kimi, the other film he shot in the pandemic, is also set in the pandemic.
Its prophecies are hardly futuristic. Kimi is not the name of the protagonist played by Zoe Kravitz – her name is Angela – but that of a fictional voice-controlled virtual assistant, like Alexa and Siri, only shittier. (Its response to a user’s request to play Taylor Swift’s “Me” is ‘Yes, I am listening to you’.) Its founder (Derek DelGaudio) pitches it as a product that has an edge over its competitors for its human element. “People,” he says in the sort of phoney corporate tone that hints at something rotten within, to a TV journalist over a Zoom interview, dodging her question about what that means for users’ privacy. He has tech employees like Angela whose daily job is to go through audio recording of each of these misinterpreted messages (such as the Taylor Swift one) and correct them so that the software gets smarter.
We spend time with Angela, getting habituated to the rhythms of her life in lockdown in her industrial chic apartment in Seattle, before the drama kicks in. She wakes up, taking in scenes from the street outside but more intently, peering into the apartment of Terry (Byron Bowers), who she occasionally flirts with over texts and sometimes has sex with (Soderbergh, who recently complained about the sexlessness of superhero movies, makes sure his characters are not without it even in lockdown). Meanwhile, another man (Devin Ratray) from that building looks at her through binoculars.
Angela is altogether a new kind of hero, who belongs to the moment and is rightly a woman.
This creates a sort of ambiguous voyeuristic triangle that provides a preamble for the main action and the central theme, which is listening into other people’s lives. Angela’s job gives her access to Kimi users in their unguarded moments; in no time, she’s being chased by hired assassins tracking her every move with the help of high tech. This is after she stumbles upon a recording – the product really is flawed – of a conversation between a woman and a man who possibly raped her and threatens her to keep her mouth shut.
Angela joins the likes of Thomas from Blow-Up (1966), Harry from The Conversation (1974) and Jack Terri from Blowout (1981), a professional whose handling of media material leads to the accidental discovery of a crime and then who decides to investigate it against all odds; in her case it’s a damning evidence of corporate coverup and muzzling of whistleblowing expose. But she is also the gothic protagonist of a horror film who will bring justice to another woman who had been wronged in the past (Angela herself has a history, possibly involving sexual assault, it is suggested by a scene with her therapist). She’s hardened by her past experiences, but also extremely vulnerable and has agoraphobia, and Soderbergh and Kravtiz animate her with just the right body language – one of her things is speed drying her sanitised hands with a gesture that looks like super fast clapping without the hands ever actually touching. Angela is altogether a new kind of hero, who belongs to the moment and is rightly a woman. It’s interesting that Kimi, like all such devices, fictional or otherwise, is also female, and it makes sense when in a crucial scene in the final act, like a ghost in a machine, it springs to life and saves the day.
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