"Rear Window," "Disturbia," "Kimi": Creepy, Creepier, Creepiest

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​"REAR WINDOW," "DISTURBIA," "KIMI": CREEPY, CREEPIER, CREEPIEST

​       There can be no arguing that what the world needs now is love, but mayhaps what the world also needs just as much right now is a great escapist movie.
​     Happily for for us all, even while sequestered in our houses there is available to us on our screens an overabundance of thrilling cinematic fare to whisk us away for a couple of hours; and especially happily for those with HBO Max is the recent release of an out-of-this world psychological thriller called "Kimi."
       "Kimi" could be described as high-tech Hitchcockian. In fact fellow film buffs will recognize the movie as the latest iteration of that 1954 Hitchcock classic "Rear Window,"

...in which a bored, wheel-chair-bound journalist played by Jimmy Stewart who has little other diversion than watching what's going on outside his window begins to wonder along with those around him if he's a witness to a murder or a captive of his own imagination.

    The 2007 film "Disturbia" staring Shia LaBoeuf,

...is a terrific, edge-of-your-seat, high-tech-for-the-time update of "Rear Window" with the character of the incapacitated journalist replaced by a troubled teenager under house arrest and cuffed with an ankle monitor who suspects danger in the neighborhood but has too little credibility to be believed.

      And now there's "Kimi." 

      The title refers to Kimi, an electronic digital voice-activated directions-taking thingy - or however you'd describe thingies like Alexa and Siri, which is what Kimi is as well. 

      The difference, though, between Kimi and those other devices is that Kimi is constantly being made smarter by a ubiquitous, anonymous cadre of IT listeners whose job is to correct misunderstandings and distortions on the machine's end, which is a creepy enough concept.
      The human protagonist in this "Rear Window" descendant is a Kimi-corrector named Angela, portrayed in a knock-out performance by Zoë Kravitz.

​        Like her forerunner characters, Angela must stay inside her house, a nonetheless very cool, spacious loft in a repurposed Seattle warehouse district refurbished into a complex of, one guesses, equally cool, spacious lofts.

     But unlike her predecessors, Angela is imprisoned not by a shackle or physical immobility, but by a crippling fear of leaving her house. 
​     Her agoraphobia has been amplified by the COVID pandemic, and so she spends her days  looking  out her window at her neighbors,

...particularly longingly at one, whom she sometimes invites up via text message for some brief companionship, 

...after which she feels compelled to completely sanitize the place. 
​     Otherwise she's swallowing medications, obsessively pumping hand sanitizer, brushing and re-brushing her teeth, and doing what appears to be the numbingly boring job of listening to and diagnosing piles of mundane recordings of people trying to get their Kimis to understand them,

...all the while in the grip of her paranoia and self-inflicted isolation.
        But then Angela comes across a distorted Kimi recording that she listens and re-listens to until she's convinced that the sounds she's hearing are of a woman being assaulted.

       More digging leads her down a digital rabbit hole where what she believes she discovers forces her to face her most terrible fear,

...and puts her life into danger that's not in her imagination.

        Along with the "Rear Window" motif, "Kimi" borrows tropes from other thrillers - think "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,"

...and there's also a device borrowed from another classic thriller that I won't mention here so as not to spoil, but which old movie fans will recognize to their delight.
        I've watched "Kimi," twice so far. With the latest world news reports I'll probably have to go watch it again.    ​