“Trust me, I know bad. I used to moderate for Facebook.”

A COVID-19 paranoid thriller from Steven Soderbergh that draws inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, Kimi casts Zoë Kravitz as a neurotic recluse who works from her Seattle loft as an analyst for a tech startup on the verge an IPO. The company sells a Siri/Alexa-like device that differentiates itself with the human touch—instead of merely using algorithms, Kimi’s datastreams are monitored by real people who help make improvements when the system misinterprets commands.

It is while reviewing these banal interactions that Angela (Kravitz) stumbles upon an alarming audio clip that demands urgent action, a mission she elects to see through even though she is terrified of the outside world and is met with increasingly threatening resistance from corporate overlords.

The screenplay (from David Koepp) is fairly straightforward—although it does toy with ideas of digital privacy, quarantine life, MeToo, and tech dystopia, and has a wicked fun ending involving a nail gun—which means the bulk of the film’s merit lies in Kravitz’s awkward jitterbug performance and Soderbergh’s taut filmmaking. He pulls off a nifty little sequence when Angela manipulates the audio clip that recalls a similar one from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and effectively uses canted angles and an overcranked frame rate to suggest a character on the verge of panic.

It’s decidedly low-stakes, but even if Kimi doesn’t approach the level of sophistication or provocation of its antecedents, there is something to be said about Soderbergh’s willingness to tell routine genre stories with such a high level of craftsmanship.