Here we have Steven Soderbergh playing in a conventional genre that he sometimes like to dabble in. There’s nothing particularly unique about the story on a bullet point list level, but the energy and the acting is pretty great. It’s what this master of the craft does sometimes when he just wants to make a thriller.

The film stars Zoe Kravitz as an analyst of failed searches from a digital assistant named Kimi (thing Siri or Alexa). One of those failed searches sounds like a woman in distress. She goes on a deep dive to uncover what she heard and then has to decide who to trust with the info.

I like that this movie is set during the time of Covid without being a Covid film. It’s an incidental background detail and that’s so much more refreshing than just another movie about a pandemic or a pandemic-filmed movie that’s pretending not to be.

Zoe Kravitz is playing an agoraphobe who certainly got worse during the lock-down. In so doing, she became casual glance-across-the-way friends with various neighbors through her rear window. We also have shades of Blow-Up, Blow-Out, and The Conversation. This shares a lot of DNA with ’70s conspiracy thriller and I dig it.

Kravitz does a lot of the heavy lifting in this film. She’s great. Her physical performance as she moves about, especially in scenes in the outside world are pretty great. I never thought of her as a great (or bad) actress but she proves she can do a lot in this film. I like the character she’s created her – brusque, reserved, closed-off, smart.

She’s helped by some stellar camera work. The way her exterior scenes are shot with a moving, swooping, sped-up camera are pretty great. They follow her, shoot past, and turn around as if they are as anxious as she is. It adds to her internal fear and paranoia (and there’s one just amazing shot of her in the back of a van that deserves extra praise).

I really enjoyed this paranoia, conspiracy, high tech thriller and all of its existing influences. I dig that it links classic conspiracy thrillers to the ongoing use of digital assistants and the people in tech who have to monitor some pretty sick stuff. It’s a bit of a message well embedded in standard genre tropes.

This is a good, surprisingly energetic film. Kravitz turns in a great performance in what is otherwise – on paper – a pretty standard thriller. But the work from all involved elevates it to something more. This is a lot of fun.

Score: 87