Lately, movies have fewer locations, smaller casts and have hinted on the pandemic world we’ve found ourselves in. The film industry is adjusting, not just with set protocols, but storylines as well. Movies like Locked Down and TV shows like This Is Us had storylines dedicated to how its characters managed the pandemic.
Kimi is no exception and it doesn’t shield itself from the modern world. The story centers on Angela, a work-from-home employee who suffers from agoraphobia and anxiety to the point that she can’t seem to step outside her apartment to meet a guy she likes.
Most people are wearing face masks; Angela constantly uses hand sanitizer, and other nuances brought on by the pandemic are prevalent.
Angela works at Amygdala, the company that created Kimi — similar to Alexa or Siri. What sets this company apart from the others is that they employ agents to listen in and remedy problems that customers experience. If you ever were frustrated by Alexa not understanding your command, this was the answer to the problem — real people with the capability to understand what you meant and who could update the algorithm. One day, as Angela goes through her cases she thinks she hears a violent crime taking place. Who can she report it to? And what forces are preventing her from getting the truth out there?
Kimi stars Zoë Kravitz, and the film was written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Here are five screenwriting takeaways from Kimi:
1. Exposition: the necessary evil
Exposition can be difficult because it often involves a lot of words and not much action. That is why exposition often comes in the form of a musical number in Disney movies; it can get boring. In Kimi, there isn’t the luxury of a song and dance number, so instead the filmmakers opted to set up what Kimi is at the beginning of the film with an interview. Even if the viewer didn’t know the plot of the story, it’s easy to see how this could turn into a contemporary thriller.
The CEO of Amygdala (Derek DelGaudio) sits in front of his home computer being interviewed for a major cable news network. He shares how Kimi differs from other devices, addresses the privacy concerns, and talks about the company's upcoming IPO.
Writers can observe how exposition is provided in an interviewer/interviewee setting. While it’s not the most exciting form of exposition, it works because it doesn’t feel forced. Seeing interviews on TV is common, so the film feels like an extension of what we might experience in our daily lives.
2. Setting up the protagonist’s world
Within just a few minutes we learn about who Angela (Kravitz) is and how she lives her life. She’s alone in her apartment and communicates with her neighbors across the street through text messages. This is her COVID life: being able to chat at a distance, wearing her mask, using hand sanitizer, and fearing being around others for fear of getting sick. She takes anxiety medicine (which doesn’t seem to help) and she chats through video with her mother.
As someone who is agoraphobic, she struggles to exit her apartment. But she’s not afraid of people — the neighbor she can’t seem to leave her apartment to meet at a food truck for breakfast comes over in the evening for a casual hookup.
She works from home, is fearful of leaving, and prefers to keep communication with others to a minimum. And then there’s Kimi. Angela uses the device to control every aspect of her life, from changing the TV channels to making phone calls to telling her the time.
Writers can see how to set up their protagonist with plenty of obstacles and challenges they’ll have to meet later in the story; even small nuances that a writer can exploit that connects later in the story.
3. Limited locations
There are more and more calls for scripts that limit the number of locations. This not only keeps the budget down, but often requires scaling down the story. For most of Kimi, the characters are seen on a video or briefly in Angela’s life.
And for the most part, it’s just Angela in her apartment. With few characters to interact with and being trapped inside a small space, how does a storyteller make this interesting? Being limited to locations doesn’t necessarily mean the characters are cut off from the rest of the world. Angela still interacts with people, such as her neighbor Terry (Byron Bowers), with whom she hooks up; a Romanian co-worker who helps her with IT problems, and several other co-workers as she tries to unravel the mystery.
Writers can see how to make the most out of limited locations. This includes seeing the conflicts with one person within a single location and the personal challenges she faces in her life. It’s not unlike Home Alone in which, for a good portion of the film, an eight-year-old deals with his internal conflicts, managing the house by himself and setting up an elaborate way to prevent burglars from entering.
4. The detective story
Angela’s job is all about listening to the frustrations recorded by Kimi. What if one of these issues recorded a violent crime? In a job that is repetitive and boring, the slightest hint of something different can trigger curiosity. When Angela thinks she hears violence behind a loud song playing to hide it, she immediately becomes the detective in the story trying to solve the problem.
Whether it’s J.J. Gittes in Chinatown or Ace Ventura, every detective-type story unravels with the protagonist learning that what they are investigating is more than what it seems. They must figure out what’s really going on, while those involved are trying to thwart their efforts.
Writers can see the tropes of a detective story play out in Kimi starting with investigating a potential crime only to discover that nefarious characters will do anything to ensure the crime remains unsolved.
5. The hidden theme
A film shouldn’t hinge on a single story and Kimi is no exception. While Angela’s story takes up the bulk of the film, there is another underlying theme being told and that is the real-world concerns of privacy and access to data.
The whole idea of this movie is someone listening in on someone else’s life, even though the actual person and their device information are not provided to the listener. And yet, privacy is being lost and data can be erased or manipulated. These are real concerns and writers can use the issues to create a connection with the audience and add subtext to their film.
Kimi is streaming on HBO Max.