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Starring Zoë Kravitz, the HBO Max movie is an update on ‘Rear Window’ in the days of virtual assistants and smart speakers
‘Kimi’ slipped into the HBO Max grid a couple of months ago with hardly any noise and is a perfect example of the bulk of films that this type of platform should aspire to: simple and well-told stories that leave one with a good taste in the mouth. Like other titles like the entertaining ‘Disturbia’, ‘Kimi’ revisits one of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, ‘Rear Window’, and adapts it to these new times of artificial intelligence, virtual assistants and smart speakers. The premise is simple: Amygdala, the company behind Kimi, a sort of Siri or Alexa, is about to go public. Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) works for this service, a young woman who is dedicated to correcting the errors of understanding that the system often has and improving the way in which Kimi listens and understands customers. Everything goes well, until in one of the audios that the young woman receives to analyze, she hears what appears to be a crime.
From there, the young woman will try to unravel all the mysteries that surround an issue that the company she works for does not seem to want to hear or talk about. With a contained duration -barely more than an hour and a half, which at this point seems almost a miracle-, ‘Kimi’ is an entertaining thriller, full of freshness, despite the fact that it looks at and pays tribute to a classic, which takes advantage of its limitations -it does not have a large budget and it is a film with few characters and settings- to bring us closer to the anguish that its protagonist tries to combat while solving the intrigue of the audio. Because Angela suffers from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces and crowds that keeps her at home against her will, just as the protagonist of ‘Rear Window’ had a leg in a cast and the kid from ‘Disturbia’, a bracelet anklet in direct contact with the Police. And she entertains herself, as they also did, observing the neighbors in front of her. Her courage will be put to the test when she is forced to go out to report the facts to her company.
To add insult to injury, the recent coronavirus pandemic has plunged the protagonist even deeper into her problem. Yes, there are masks, and yes, they are part of the plot with such amazing naturalness that one wonders why most fictions omit these two infernal years. The great thing about the concise and brilliant script by David Koepp, architect of the scripts for movies like ‘Panic Room’, the first ‘Spider-Man’ or ‘Jurassic Park’, is that he barely has to tell it. It is enough to see the face masks, as one more accessory, or the gesture with which the protagonist dries her hands every time the hydroalcoholic gel is applied. Something that everyone can identify with. “It’s gotten to a point where we take a lot of notes on the scripts. But I finished this script and I didn’t have any. It is so perfectly executed, so concise, so efficient, so playful… I couldn’t wait to watch the movie”, Kravitz has come to say about it in a recent interview.
‘Kimi’ does not play to overcomplicate the plot and it is to be appreciated in an industry, that of celluloid, which lives more and more attached to the constant and absurd plot twists. Perhaps that is why it looks so comfortable, because it feels original, even if it does not offer anything radically new or be groundbreaking. Behind this proposal, along with Koepp, is Steven Soderbergh, restless filmmaker and creator of titles as disparate as ‘Erin Brockovich’, ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, ‘Contagion’ or the series ‘The Knick’, who dares to do the same a great production full of big names, which shoots you ‘Disturbed’ with the iPhone as the only camera. He doesn’t always get it right, but he knows how to tell stories, he has a pulse for the thriller and, of course, he knows by heart the place where he should place the camera to shake the viewer, who here gets to experience the overwhelm, anguish and anxiety that he lives in. her own meats the protagonist.
In this sense, Kravitz throws the full weight of the film on her back and once again proves that she is one of the most talented actresses of her generation. Along the way, disquisitions about the misunderstanding suffered by those who live with mental disorders, terrible companies and CEOs who only want to improve the results of their profit account, whatever it takes, and a more satisfying ending than that of some of the movies. in which ‘Kimi’ is seen. In short, a film that is pure entertainment for an artisan of the seventh art.
‘Kimi’ is available on HBO Max.
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