Soderbergh and Koepp build a lean, old-fashioned thriller around a smart speaker and a woman who cannot cross her own doorstep, and Zoë Kravitz carries it easily. The first half is close to perfect; the second is a chase we have seen before.
Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) has a good job, a large flat and no intention of leaving it. She works for the company behind Kimi, a smart speaker, and her days are spent with headphones on, listening to the recordings where the machine got something wrong and correcting it. She has rules for herself, and the film shows them rather than explaining them. Then a recording comes through with a noise under the music, and she cannot stop listening to it. That is the whole idea. Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp get it done in 89 minutes, and for the first half of them this is as good a small thriller as we have seen in some time. The second half is more ordinary, and we will come to it.
Soderbergh shoots and cuts the film himself, as he tends to, and the choices are simple and right. Inside the flat the camera is steady and the light is warm. Philip Messina’s production design makes the flat look like somewhere a person could plausibly choose never to leave, which is the point. When Angela finally steps outside, the lenses go wide, the camera tilts and the pavement seems to lean at her. It is an old trick. Soderbergh does not oversell it, which is why it works.
The scene we will remember is the one where nobody moves. Angela at her desk, headphones on, going through the recording piece by piece, playing it again and again. Koepp writes it as procedure and Soderbergh lets it run. We felt sick, quietly, when the noise resolved into a voice, partly because the film had made us wait for it and partly because Kravitz does not react. She just listens harder, and then she plays it again. It is the best piece of suspense in the film and it is a woman sitting in a chair.
Kravitz holds the whole thing together. Angela is prickly and precise, and the script gives her a set of rituals, the checking, the wiping, the sequence at the door, without ever giving her a speech about them. There is a scene where Terry, played by Byron Bowers with a patience that is starting to fray, asks her to walk with him to a food truck across the street, and she gets as far as the threshold. Bowers plays the hurt small, and Kravitz plays the failure smaller. Rita Wilson has one scene as Natalie Chowdhury, a manager who is friendly right up to the moment she is not, and one scene is all she needs. Robin Givens, as Angela’s mother, is a voice on the phone and one of the film’s warmer notes.
Cliff Martinez, who has scored for Soderbergh since Sex, Lies, and Videotape, gives the flat a low electronic hum and saves the strings for the street, where they swell in a way that owes an open debt to Hitchcock. Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes draw the same line between indoors and out, and she never overplays it. Small choices, made by people who knew what the film was.
What does not work is the plot, once it gets going. Angela leaves the flat, the film turns into a chase, and the men chasing her are the least interesting thing in it. Charles Halford and Jacob Vargas are billed as Tall Thug and Glasses Thug, which tells you roughly how much Koepp has given them to play. Derek DelGaudio’s Bradley Hasling, the company’s boss, is seen mostly on a screen and stays there. The conspiracy behind the recording is off the shelf, and we will say nothing about the last twenty minutes except that they arrive faster than we expected; we checked the time thinking there must be another reel.
Most critics have been warmer about this than we are, and we understand why: it is brisk, it is intelligent about how people live through their devices, and it never wastes a minute. Set beside Soderbergh’s other quick, small pictures it is one of the most polished. Set beside Rear Window and Blow Out, which every review including this one has now mentioned, it is a slighter thing, and it knows it.
Watch it at home, in a flat, with the door locked. It is 89 minutes long and you will not look at your phone, mostly because you will be watching hers.
