Kimi (2022)

Not specifically in a Soderbergh film, but in “The Conversation” (where Gene Hackman played a solitary surveillance snoop who realizes he may have recorded a murder), and in a handful of other cinematic references that Soderbergh does winking homage to: “Blow-Up,” “Rear Window,” “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” — and, in a funny way, the recycling spirit of Brian De Palma, who’s evoked through the film’s voluptuous old-fashioned musical score, by Cliff Martinez, which sounds like an homage to the Hitchcock/Herrmann homages of Pino Donaggio.

Angela has to play with filters and equalizers to isolate the voice from the background noise, and it’s in that long, eerie sequence of sonic exploration that you realize that “Kimi” is working in the same fields as Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966), Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) and Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981) – movies in which horrific crimes can be glimpsed through the static of our all-pervasive media state.

The sensation of déjà vu is compounded by Angela’s efforts to extract clearer audio from the recording and determine whether she’s hearing what she thinks she’s hearing, à la John Travolta in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (which was already a riff on Antonioni’s Blow-Up ).

The story is an exercise in techno-paranoia, which is always fun, with echoes of such genre classics as Coppola's The Conversation , De Palma's Blow Out , and Antonioni's Blowup , along with grateful nods to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window .

It certainly is built as an ordinary genre piece — so ordinary you’ll be reminded of other paranoid suspense films during the whole eighty-nine-minute running time, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and carrying on through countless descendants to 2021’s The Woman in the Window .

The setting of a confined apartment and sense of voyeurism will bring up parallels with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

The other film it brings to mind isn’t a classic thriller but the 1995 movie The Net , in which Sandra Bullock plays an isolated systems analyst who socializes online and orders pizza off a website, behavior that’s entirely commonplace now but was presented at the time as the height of disconnection.

Essentially, Kimi is Rear Window meets The Net, set during the COVID pandemic.

But once the movie’s thriller elements accelerate, David Koepp’s script resorts to tired tropes, borrowing shamelessly from Rear Window, Blow Out, The Firm and even Koepp’s own Panic Room screenplay.

Establishing every inch of her apartment from nearly the get-go, Kimi is a masterclass in build-up, reminiscent of Koepp’s own Panic Room .

Scripted by veteran screenwriter David Koepp (whose “Panic Room” ultimately influences this movie as much as any of the New Hollywood masterpieces that are baked into the premise) and tailored to the antiseptic urgency that has defined so much of Soderbergh’s digital era work, “Kimi” is a slender 89-minute headrush that’s so contained and cut down to the bone that it might feel like a half-hearted COVID doodle if not for how vividly it embodies the pandemic’s twin pangs of isolation and agoraphobia.

(Cliff Martinez, who composed the score, does an arresting job of suggesting the somber themes written by Bernard Herrmann for other Hitchcock films like Psycho and Vertigo .)