Kimi (2022)

Ever since coming out of (an admittedly short lived) retirement, Steven Soderbergh has been cranking out films with his first effort in 2022 being the thriller Kimi (2022) starring Zoë Kravitz in the leading role. Kravitz plays Angela, an agoraphobic tech wizard working for a company that has created KIMI, a riff on Alexa or Siri, whose job it is to work out kinks in the program that arise from various user experiences. Her only human contact is Terry (Byron Bowers) a guy who lives across the street and comes over for hookups whenever Angela calls. Apart from Terry, she's pointedly avoiding contact with everyone else in her life, which has left her more than a little paranoid. This reaches its apex when she receives a customer complaint in which she thinks she hears the sound of a murder being committed. She uses her tech skills to isolate the sounds she hears and, like John Travolta's character in Brian De Palma's Blow Out before her, spirals down a rabbit hole of attempting to prove that a crime was committed when everyone around her tells her that she's just being paranoid. With a first half set almost entirely in Angela's apartment, the film smartly employs several claustrophobic techniques to mimic Angela's own sense of paranoia. The film's best scene also comes in that first hour when Bowers' character comes over for a hookup and we see Zoë Kravitz topless immediately after their encounter! Hey, if you're gonna be trapped with a character in their home for the majority of a film, she might as well be played by Zoë Kravitz!