Director Steven Soderbergh is back to his usual ways. After un-retiring in the most dramatic fashion some years ago, the filmmaker has been pounding out new movies and shows with even more regularity than before. The latest in his ongoing deal with HBO Max, a thriller titled KIMI, will arrive on the streaming service on February 10, 2022.
His last couple of films—Let Them All Talk and No Sudden Move—also released on HBO Max, as will his next, Magic Mike’s Last Dance. The KIMI release date announcement also came with a first look at star Zoë Kravitz, who plays an agoraphobic Seattle tech worker who uncovers a crime.
The ensemble also includes Byron Bowers, Jaime Camil, Erika Christensen, Derek DelGaudio, Robin Givens, Charles Halford, Devin Retray, Jacob Vargas, and Rita Wilson. KIMI is written by Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, who also produced alongside Soderbergh’s frequent collaborator Michael Polaire.
In an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast earlier this year, Soderbergh revealed that KIMI is set in a post-COVID world, and described it as a cross between Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and David Fincher’s Panic Room. In his words:
“[That it’s set] in the aftermath of [Covid-19] is an aspect of the story, Overlaid [on top of that] is a very contemporary, zeitgeist-y issue of giant tech companies that have a lot of listening devices in a lot of homes, and what are they picking up? And what if you worked for one of these companies analyzing streams that have been flagged for some reason or another. That the voice recognition software — that there’s some aspect of the recording that it doesn’t understand. It gets kicked [up] to a human analyst to listen to it. And she hears something that sounds… not cool.”
Soderbergh worked on the film’s edit at around the same time as he was directing this year’s Oscars ceremony. The filmmaker stressed on the podcast that he was very enthusiastic about directing KIMI, because he only responds to projects that really speak to him. He said, “It’s an idea that David Koepp floated to me a couple of years ago. My philosophy when people approach you with things, if it’s not a ‘hell, yeah,’ it’s a no. This was a ‘hell, yeah.’”
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates about KIMI and the several other projects that Soderbergh is working on. You can read an official synopsis here:
The film follows an agoraphobic tech worker who discovers recorded evidence of a violent crime during an ordinary data stream review and tries reporting it up the chain of command at her company. Meeting with resistance and bureaucracy, she realizes that in order to get involved, she will have to do the thing she fears the most — leave her apartment.