Russia (bbabo.net), - Stephen Soderbergh, who once started with the provocative drama "Sex, Lies and Videos", which seemed shockingly bold then, is now returning to the topic of the latest technologies that dramatically change our entire way of life in a techno-thriller "Kimi". Here the motifs of Antonioni's "Blow Up" merge with Hitchcockian suspense, the actual anxieties of digital terror - with the psychic attack of the world lockdown and the paranoid fears of the #MeToo era. The picture became another sensation of the HBO streaming service.
The film is based on the script of one of the most successful US screenwriters David Koepp, whose filmography includes such cult spectacles as the Indiana Jones franchise, Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park, The Mummy, Spider-Man, Witty " Death suits her,” he knows a lot about tense plots.
The suspense in "Kimi" is very special: the film is like slow torture. Loneliness. The claustrophobia of a person forced to be locked within four walls and gradually weaning from living a normal life is a state familiar to everyone today. The unreality of such an existence, where a person feels open to all views and deprived of any privacy. "How do you know the structure of the retina of my eye?" - the heroine of the film naively asks her management. "Haven't you read the contract where our right to do so is in the fine print?" - typical answer of new times. Do we always read the fine print in the treaties that have entangled us?
Angela Childs works for the Amygdala Corporation, which makes devices like Siri, a virtual assistant that follows the owner's commands; here they are called Kimi. She is on duty on the line, listening to the voice stream, correcting the shortcomings of the latest model, which does not always understand commands correctly, and enriching her vocabulary with household neologisms such as "paper napkin". That is, this Kimi is an advanced machine, capable of learning and improving. The heroine works, as is now customary, "at a distance", and her long-term injury has managed to develop into a serious psychological fear of open spaces - agoraphobia.
She wants a live conversation and winks at the guy in the window across the street, but she can't bring herself to leave the house even for an emergency visit to the dentist. Occasionally he speaks on the phone with his superiors, with his mother, the obliging Kimi commands - that's the whole circle of friends. Soderbergh is one of those few masters who benefit from a small budget and other restrictions. The first half of the picture is practically a monofilm, where the direction is not only virtuoso, but downright inspired: a huge apartment in Seattle seems to be filled with the expectation of something indistinct, indefinite, formless and viscous, having no end-edge. Waiting for the end of this trouble - most likely, even more terrible.
One day, while listening to a stream, Angela notices strange sounds in the recording, drowned out by loud music: a woman is pleading for help. Realizing that she unwittingly witnessed an act of violence and, possibly, murder, the heroine tries to raise the alarm, finds the courage to finally go outside and goes to the boss's office. The arrangement of this trip in the film is reminiscent of Dorothy's visit to the country of winkies: everything is smiling, extremely polite, but lifeless and meaningless. It was as if everyone around became like Kimi's robot - computer-generated and, as it were, even thinking, but inanimate.
And the feeling of a vague, rapidly escalating danger grows from episode. The heroine does not yet know why, but the sight of two men in the corridor plunges her into a panic, and a strange chase begins for no one knows why. Even crowds of protesters on the street will seem like a mechanical puppet theater, who, as if in between times, also not knowing why, at a critical moment will come to her aid - unreasoning solidarity is programmed into them. And this unstoppable run will continue until complete exhaustion of both the audience and the heroine in Zoya Kravitz's remarkable selfless performance.
The second and last "act" of this mechanistic drama, this collision of the last living person on earth with a society of zombies enslaved by technology, is extremely dynamic and full of naturalistic details. This is the agony of everything that was life, a new spectacle for the amusement of the townsfolk who are indifferent to everything: a man running with the last of his strength and the echoing, doom-filled space around. An upside down world where crime has been raised to the norm, and the criminal becomes the one who tries to bring crime to clean water.
It is known that the idea of the script was born before the invasion of COVID-19, and the pandemic with its lockdowns arrived in time to exacerbate and manifest this sense of isolation and loneliness that has gripped the planet. And the fact that loneliness is bizarrely combined with the absolute transparency of our existence and the notorious digital terror formed an explosive mixture of tremendous power in the film: here everything is against a person, everything strives to destroy in him the last signs of a living, thinking, human-friendly subject.
bbabo.Net