Steven Soderbergh is back in a frenzy and is making films like on a treadmill at a Woodleyan pace of (at least) one a year. After “No Sudden Move”, the menu and best film after his four-year film break, Soderbergh made another exciting and extremely current thriller that could also be described as Kovid’s High-tech “Window to the Yard”. That person who looks out the window not at the yard, but at one of the streets of Seattle, is a young computer scientist Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz). She works from the house for technology corporation Amygdala, which has just launched a new product Kimi, or some digital voice assistant like Amazon’s Alexe only, will be even more sophisticated and with more features (fuck, I have no idea about these new technologies so I do not know how to describe those shit!).
Amygdala is due to go public in a few days and her CEO believes she will be fabulously rich, but Angela, an agoraphobic and anxious loner who was further affected by the situation with lockdowns, quarantines and similar situations related to COVID-19, will discover something suspiciously. Her job is to monitor streams and solve problems, and who knows how much she doesn’t even get out of the spacious apartment where she lives. Angela seems to have some serious problems like obsessive-compulsive disorder, germophobia and the like, and she communicates with everyone via Skype, FaceTime and the like which allows her not to have real interactions.
But that will change when it seems to her that one video she is monitoring records a real crime, and when she realizes that everyone is trying to cover it up and cover it up, it might be too late because she, too, will be in danger. Although it may be a bit exaggerated by the end, Soderbergh wrote the screenplay by the experienced David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Panic Room), an incredibly exciting, entertaining, intriguing and dynamic thriller at a crazy pace. There is not even a hundred idle time and again Soderbergh is extremely economical (the film does not last an hour and a half), and the camera and direction are such that further enhance the impression of paranoia, isolation, insecurity and thus almost jump into Angela’s skin.
And Zoe Kravitz is on a task level like this antisocial freak who, presumably, has experienced some trauma that has further influenced her to completely isolate herself from the rest of the world. Almost the entire first half of the film was shot practically exclusively from Angela’s position and we have the impression that we are in the apartment with her, so that by the end “Kimi” will turn into a more conventional thriller. Again, Soderbergh under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard took care of the editing himself, which further affects the incredibly fast pace and dynamics. Although we have had films about voyeurism, surveillance, invading someone’s privacy since Hitchock and later through Coppola (Eavesdropping) and De Palma (Blow Out, Body Double) and many others, Koepp and Soderbergh have combined all this with modern technologies and knowing that all this can be done in a much simpler way without any problems today than it did three or four decades ago.
From the very beginning, this whole film seems completely scary, uncomfortable, disturbing (thanks in large part to Soderbergh’s technique and style), but also to the fact that everything we see here is not science fiction at all, but something that happens. However, the viewer does not have time to think about the topic of loss of privacy and the fact that our data and information about all of us are available to who knows who because everything happens so fast and we are drawn into Angela’s case. and that today someone can easily follow us and know everything he wants without even leaving his apartment. Rating 7.5 / 10.
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