BY ALISE CHAFFINS
Science fiction has been asking us to look at the dark side of artificial intelligence for a long time. Isaac Asimov gave us “The Three Laws,” and those have been used by filmmakers to ask questions about how AI might impact our daily lives. As devices like Alexa and Siri become more commonplace, we are seeing more movies that look at how they might be abused by bad faith actors. Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie “Kimi,” streaming on HBO Max tackles this issue.
Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz) is an agoraphobic whose disorder is amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. She works for Amygdala, a tech company that has created KIMI, a fictional Amazon Echo. The difference with this product is that everything is recorded, and when KIMI doesn’t function as expected, a human listens to the interaction and updates the software so it better understands things like regional slang.
The mystery starts when Angela hears a recording that sounds like a woman is in distress. She reports the finding to her boss who tells her, not suspiciously at all, that she should let it go. Angela does not let it go (we later find out that she was also the victim of an assault), and eventually she goes to the headquarters, where the movie takes a wild turn with a chase, a stabbing, and three murders.
As I was watching this movie, I felt like Soderbergh had an interesting idea that just never came together in the storytelling. The thought of real people listening to our smart devices to make them work better feels plausible and terrifying. Making it into a murder mystery is certainly a way to go, and I think it could have been fascinating if the murderer hadn’t been the character that it was. So much of the back half of the movie felt clunky and contrived in ways that I just couldn’t buy, scored with music that took me out of the moment entirely.
Kravitz absolutely carries the movie. The bulk of it is her alone in her apartment, and in those scenes, she shines. As she moves out of her apartment, the story starts to get unfocused and nonsensical (She just happens to live across the street from another agoraphobe? The goons try to kidnap her in front of a massive protest?). Her performance is very good all the way through, but things that get lots of attention are never resolved, and her performance can’t salvage a weak script.
I really wanted to like this movie. HAL 9000 is still one of the scariest entities to ever exist. Most episodes of Black Mirror haunt me regularly. As we continue to battle the pandemic, our relationship with technology has evolved, and I think that could have been a truly fascinating subject for this movie, if Soderbergh had chosen to focus on that. Unfortunately, he tried to put too much in the movie, and it just didn’t come together.
Kimi, play Sabotage.
ALISE CHAFFINS is a Morgantown writer who loves movies and sharing her opinions. Find more at MacGuffin or Meaning on Substack.
