Wife assigned me a task a few weeks ago to find her a movie that takes place during covid. She’s been watching a lot of media that takes her out of the fiction by eliding the last two years of the pandemic. Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, which were so dutiful about trying to portray covid for a season, set their present season in a fictional post-covid world, but they don’t take pains to talk about the collective trauma and loss that ensued. Even shows like Hawkeye set themselves in “the present day,” without much interest in trying to create verisimilitude. Present is really future, but the ever-flexible metaphor of the Snappening seems to have done the emotional labor of the pandemic without room for such an event. That may not come to define artistic decisions in the future–maybe it makes sense to remove such an event from the canon of those fictional timelines, yet so much that’s gritty about the last two decades has been left entangled in the fictional cinematic universes.
Wouldn’t it be nice, I can imagine Wife saying, to not have to live in a timeline with 9/11 or the War in Iraq, where the last six years were not such a garbage fire? And yet some of those events are too important not to wrestle with, even in fiction. I want to see masks, Wife says. I want to see romcoms about people agonizing over whether or not to waste their antigen tests on a blind date. And there are some movies that came out early anticipating a desire for exactly what Wife is expressing. Slate’s Alison Willmore wrote about this in December of last year by declaring that “Pandemic Movies Have Reached Their Awkward, In-Between Phase.” This leads to Kimi, a Steven Soderbergh movie from HBO, specially crafted as a time capsule for last year.
Kimi is a simple story running under 90 minutes that hits a lot of the high notes of Soderbergh’s more recent experiments with female led escape thrillers, like Claire Foy’s performance in Unsane, which at the time was billed more for its innovative cinematic limitations using only iPhones, but really became more emblematic of a new style emerging from a thoughtful and prolific director.
Kimi is a film about denialism, transitioning, the trauma of assault and the trauma of covid. Angela is described as having “relapsed,” she’s a shut in, agoraphobic, but also we have a sense that authorities around her are in denial too, about their ability to control narratives of workplace harassment, sexual assault, corporate greed, surveillance capitalism, you name it. It’s a Rear Window variant, which is getting to be so much of a genre that Netflix is satirizing the plot with the likes of Kristen Bell.
Kimi does not suffer from the Plots That Would Be Solved by Having a Job trope that I talked about with Puzzle once. Angela’s work from home is actually convenient to the setting of third wave covid, but also it’s a nice double take because she appears–from the level of masking in her neighborhood and especially in the cool ass offices of Amygdala–to have chosen remote work to suit her mental health issues.
There are all sorts of cool character building details for Angela, like her meeting with her shockingly in-the-know dentist and the calls to her mom, even the relationship she has with the guy from quarantine is nicely sketched out to make her feel less like an addled shut in and more like a person who’s Doing Her Best with a really crummy situation. The acting is a little bit flat from all the bad guys, comes off as if they’re going through the motions of a soap opera, and their delivery is weirdly bland especially when compared to Zoe Kravitz’s performance and that of her romantic interest. Some of the chase scenes rely on the fact that Angela will not be recognized in a crowd despite the fact that she has a blue-dyed bob cut that she takes no pains to disguise with a hat or a beanie.
Ultimately, Kimi is one of the cleanest, archetypal examples of the covid aesthetic that Wife is looking for in a movie and for anyone else who is tired of artistic denialism of your reality, this is a must see.
