Hang on a second, what actually makes the KIMI system any different from Siri or Alexa again? The film claims that it's monitored by an army of actual people rather than an algorithm, but Angela isn't actually monitoring stuff in real time; she is merely correcting any of the algorithms' interpretations that are flagged as a mistake. Perhaps this is a subtle commentary on how tech CEOs tendentiously claim that their particular product is unique and impossible for others to replicate, but the general intellectual heft doesn't not lend much weight to that reading. What's more, the CEO's claim is precisely the opposite of what Big Tech always claims about its products — i.e. that they don't require human intervention and, furthermore, that this is ipso facto a good thing.
This is just the first problem with Kimi, which in many respects is a moderately competent thriller. Next is the gross disjunction between Angela's actual work and her affluence is simply too great to avoid making that same clichéd 2000s-era critique we all made about Friends, simply by observing how Angela couldn't possibly afford that lifestyle on piecemeal gig work of that nature, especially in a city as expensive as Seattle. Soderbergh is usually pretty reliable for some sort of commentary on the alienation inherent in modern work so this is conspicuous defect was a little surprising, as was the cack-handed and quite obviously staged "protest".
What compounds the film's problems, however, is the obvious inauthenticity in David Koepp's dialogue. It's much worse in Soderbergh's more recent Presence (2024), but there's just too much plot implied here through absolute clangers along the lines of "Ah, good morning my husband, I can't wait for the important IPO tomorrow." and "I thought you were getting better." Equally cack-handed are plucked-from-the-headlines mentions such as Evergreen.
Lastly, I'm not sure I'll ever warm to attempts to portray the "autism experience" on screen, even after we've seen to have moved on from the Rain Man (1988) smörgåsbord of tics and movements. Still, I guess it's a little fun to see a modern reinvention of the famous scenes Blow Up (1966) and The Conversation (1974) using a Cubase VST plugin. (Speaking of obvious homages, there's also a pretty lame and obvious joke about Rear Windows XP if someone wants to make it.)
Soderbergh’s film is less about ontological doubt regarding a recorded event plucked from the flow of reality [c.f. Blow Up (1966)] than it is about corporate occlusion of the data stream to protect profit.
— Pat Brown (Slant Magazine)
Synopsis: A tech worker with agoraphobia discovers recorded evidence of a violent crime but is met with resistance when she tries to report it. Seeking justice, she must do the thing she fears the most: leave her apartment.