On demand: "Kimi"

After a decade or so in which his aims felt ever more unclear - was he retired or not? If he was still active, was his heart in it? - Steven Soderbergh has arrived at a deal with the streaming service HBO Max that allows him to resume making the kind of films he was making in the millennium's first decade: live-action, non-franchise, actively invested in courting the eyeballs of adults, entertainments we used to be able to take for granted because there were once enough people working within the system who still wanted to make films like this. Soderbergh's latest Kimi is such a throwback it works from a script by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, The Trigger Effect, Stir of Echoes) towards a finale that involves cathartic use of a nailgun retrieved from a property in the process of being renovated; its supporting cast includes such missing-presumed-lost faces as Robin Givens, Rita Wilson and Erika Christensen, and it fades out to the strains of Elastica's "Connected". That Nineties enough for you? The set-up with which Koepp presents Soderbergh is tried-and-tested (young woman overhears something she shouldn't), but also small and manageable, a blessing for a medium-budget Covid production that for two-thirds of its duration is limited to one setting: a studio apartment in Seattle with big, cinematically helpful windows. The sole new furnishing is a decidedly 21st century piece of kit: an Alexa-like device via which Zoë Kravitz's Angela, an agoraphobic parsing data for the inevitably shady Amygdala Corporation, tunes into a struggle that may or may not have concluded in murder. So it's a little bit Rear Window, a little bit The Conversation, and a little bit Wait Until Dark; you can see why cinephiles - or really anyone seeking a good night in - might be drawn to that.

I wonder if they'll be a little bit disappointed, too - or at least a little bit disappointed if they were drawn this way by the film's largely ecstatic reviews. There's a certain amount to savour about Kimi, granted. Soderbergh is precise and economical in his description of his heroine's routine, and entirely at ease around new and newish forms of technology (the text back-and-forths that connect Angela to the outside world, the multiple open browsers, the sound files and Billie Eilish songs). Kravitz, whose pallor might be considered a plot point, demonstrates both a keen intelligence - following a string of ones and zeroes like digital breadcrumbs back to their source - while also hinting at the many ways Angela might have locked herself up inside a paranoiac worldview. For all that, the finished film still feels a tad throwaway, more proficient sketch than the genuine pulse-raisers the movies used to give us. I get the impression critics are having to talk Kimi up because, in terms of plot and style, it's the closest thing they've had in years to a major mainstream thriller from a name American director. (And this may be what film criticism now largely is: writers attempting to justify their own continued employment with glowing reference to the best a dying artform can dredge up, clutching with equal parts hope and desperation to whatever straws are floating past them.) Kimi is fine - its IMDB user score of 6.3 feels about right - but it's not vastly superior to that weightless woman-in-peril content Netflix generates every week for its customers. For starters, the budgets for these things ain't what they used to be: the interiors look the part, but when Angela is forced outside, Soderbergh has to follow her hand-held and at close quarters, reducing what might have been stirring pursuit setpieces thirty years ago to a shrugging indie shuffle. Indeed, despite a nice, trad suspense score from Cliff Martinez, as an exercise in generating tension (rather than mere motion, which you suspect Soderbergh could do in his sleep), Kimi feels undercranked. All its moving parts end up in the appropriate holes, while making naggingly hollow clunks: for the first time in a long while, I was set to thinking of Disturbia, which was Shia LaBeouf doing Rear Window back in 2007, and that still had the benefit of the big screen and Dolby Surround behind it.

Kimi is available to stream via Sky Cinema/Now TV.