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Kimi is fruitful yet incomplete. First, the story introduces interesting ideas, but doesn't follow through. Zoe Kravitz's agoraphobic protagonist leads a confined life before stumbling upon a crime recorded on a home device. From there, Kravitz attempts to expose the crime, but she's met with a bureaucratic conspiracy. This premise establishes themes of captivity, surveillance, and systemic injustice. However, these subjects don't concretely pay off. Similarly, the acting is inconsistent. Kravitz optimizes the role, yet her material is one note. She adds layers but the script lacks a clear arc, stagnating her performance. Meanwhile, her supporting cast (besides Wilson) is weak.
Beyond Kravitz, Kimi's virtue is its filmmaking. The cast, production, and effects are sparse, but craftsmanship is potent. For example, the cinematography uses varied shots and compositions to keep entertainment high and emotions palpable. In Kravitz's apartment, overheads and extreme close-ups convey importance and maintain engagement. Outside, Dutch angles, unsteady movement, and confined spacing express intense anxiety. Plus, the editing efficiently matches Kravitz's mental state, the sound symbolically reflects her perspective, and the music is oddly fitting. Soderbergh gets plenty out of this limited project. Ultimately, Kimi has merit but isn't a must-see.
Writing: 6/10
Direction: 8/10
Cinematography: 9/10
Acting: 8/10
Editing: 8/10
Sound: 8/10
Score/Soundtrack: 7/10
Production Design: 6/10
Casting: 6/10
Effects: 6/10
Overall Score: 7.2/10
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Kimi is a digital-age Alfred Hitchcock reinvention directed by the Contagion director Steven Soderbergh, and written by David Koepp, who has written movies like Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, The Mummy, The Panic Room.
It is a well-crafted tech-noir. It has an emphatic modernistic aesthetic with cool tones to convey a sense of isolation and forsakenness. It has hitchcockesque ominous music pieces in beautifully choreographed scenes.
Hitchcock’s Rear Window has been reinterpreted in many other films and shows, like Amy Adam’s ‘The Woman in the Window’, or Kristen Bell’s ‘The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window’.
Kimi is more of an Homage to Alfred Hitchcock than just a reinterpretation of one of his movies. It not only reinterprets the story of ‘people in the windows across each other’, but it also pays tribute to Hitchcock through its cinematic style, music, and even the fonts. It does so with confidence and self-awareness, and with a solid ground of a real-world story, with real-world worries, and consequences. It’s an inspired and realized work.
The movie tells the story of an agoraphobic tech employee, who while working from home finds a disturbing recording in the audio data from one of the users of the AI, Kimi.
Other than Hitchcock, the movie is also inspired by a real-life case dubbed the Amazon Arkansas Case, where data from Alexa on an Amazon Echo device was used by the police to charge a man with murder. The movie also makes a mention of the said case.
Though fairly predictable, it never pretends to be about surprising you. It rather wants to take you through the ideas, worries, and paranoia of our age in a cinematic flair.
Me-too, Covid, violence against women, toxic work culture, mental health, aggressive technology, oversharing, over-accessing, privacy concerns, manipulation of personal data, t&c frauds, isolation, and many more concerns are touched upon in the movie. It has an undertone of humor and irony, and it makes for an engaging watch.
Zoe Kravitz rocks blue hair and crafts an impressive portrayal of a tech genius struggling with agoraphobia. The way Kravitz portrays Angela Childs by not defining her by gender is interesting and aligned with a modern sensibility. Even in the movie’s apparent humor she doesn’t fail to convey the emotion of the matter. It’s a Hitchcock-themed movie, and oddly enough, even in her chopped blue hair and hoodies & sweats, she looks like an old Hollywood beauty.
There are some instances where things won’t quite make sense, and some choices that the characters make would seem questionable. But Kimi’s cinematic spirit and Zoe Kravitz pull the movie through nonetheless. The final scene of the movie is exciting and humorous and satisfying.
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