“Every time in For a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh made a truly inexplicable film,” wrote Roger Ebert in his 2002 review of Soderbergh’s. Full front. Ebert is gone, so I’ll say it – the latest Soderbergh is inexplicable here.
However, this is a reason for celebration, not horror. Even when Soderbergh is prolific and uneven in flip mode, he doesn’t direct boring movies. His latest, Kimiairs on Thursdays HBO Max, is a light-hearted horror film that is either enhanced or enhanced — hard to say — by strange narrative choices. The result is weight loss Rear window update which dares to ask questions, What if instead of Jimmy Stewart looking out the window with a broken leg, we watched Zoë Kravitz listen to audio picked up by a smart home device while grappling with a long-term traumatic phobia injury caused?
The plot itself is simple enough, especially compared to Soderbergh’s last film, Do not move suddenly, double overlap until the truth is shaken. Here, the villains are obvious, and so are the heroes. Angela Childs (Kravitz) works for technology company Amygdala, which is about to publicize the power of the Kimi device, a competitor to Alexa and Siri. Childs spends her days in a spacious, sterile industrial loft in Seattle, listening to audio flags for human interpretation and occasionally joking with her tech support colleagues in Romania. When she’s not at work, she watches the news while cycling, obsess over brushing her teeth, video chats with her mom and psychiatrist, or invites her passing neighbor Terry (Bryan Bowers) over to chat. . One day, she hears what sounds like a violent crime. When she tries to report what she hears to Amygdala, she becomes the target of powerful people who don’t want the audio leaked.
The bigger picture story is the cat-and-mouse fare often enough. However, the basic weirdness of the film reveals itself in the plot. You see, Angela is severely numb, and won’t leave her apartment, despite a painful tooth infection. However, Angela has an electric blue bob with goofy bangs. Call me a barber (literally), but this ultra-high-maintenance hairstyle would be difficult to do at home, alone. It’s hard to imagine a look that simply screams “five-hour salon appointment with regular makeup” more clearly. And yes, this movie takes place in a slightly alternate universe where Covid-19 happened, but Seattle is also being stirred up by political protests over legislation restricting the movement of unauthorized people, so perhaps in this world there has been great progress in self-coloring. at home, but okay.
Another distraction: Why is Angela so rich? She’s a well-regarded content moderator, but she lives in a huge Seattle loft that resembles some sort of modern-day Frasier Crane. There’s a frank remark that her father helped her rehabilitate, but still — we’re watching a movie about a trust baby who simply chooses to try himself as an analyst. Mid-Range (Best)? By contrast, Amygdala’s CEO, Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio), is shown at the beginning of the cinematic videoconference from a makeshift workspace in his garage. Why doesn’t this man have a home office? It’s the third year of the pandemic, and he’s in the C range! If this were a Nancy Meyers movie, we could ignore the weird setting choices. But Soderbergh is often quite adjusted in the distinction between castes.
Angela is inexplicable, this is not the same as complex. She is distrustful and cautious, but also blatantly obeys her boss when they tell her not to write anything and to go to the office instead of reporting it to the authorities. Her peasant phobia gives Soderbergh an excuse to deploy some music video-style cameras when she finally ventures out into the street, but on the flip side, it has an added element, like An early draft of the script notes that its protagonist needs more obstacles to overcome than the fearsome tech lords shooting at her life. Her romance with the neighbor is similarly included in the film as an attempt to tick a box.
