WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Kimi, now available on HBO Max.
In HBO Max’s Kimi, many despicable villains were making the world a much more twisted place amid COVID-19. Angela (Zoë Kravitz) discovered a slew of them as she stumbled onto a murder conspiracy, monitoring the quality of audio from an Alexa-like device called a Kimi. She quickly learned a woman, Samantha, was raped, and then the culprit had her killed to cover it up. However, by the time director Steven Soderbergh wrapped Kimi and Angela took out most of the criminals in her vigilante crusade, the most sadistic enemy actually got away with his identity utterly protected.
Angela was disgusted with Samantha’s problem, as she, herself, faced misogyny on a job for Evergreen in Washington. She ended up going on trial when she complained, but while that got shot to hell, she wanted to ensure Samantha would get justice and this “Brad” who assaulted her would pay. Unfortunately, the toxic Brad was CEO of Angela’s company, Amygdala, and he sent a gangster, Rivas, after her, paying him and his goons a lot of cash. Rivas, though, needed help because Angela was tech-savvy, so he hired a Russian hacker named Yuri to track her. And make no mistake, he was effective and scary.
Coming off like an operator from The Matrix with multiple keyboards and monitors, Kimi‘s Yuri plugged in, and with his headset, he started using Angela’s phone to track her. He also tapped into closed-circuit feeds in the city, using the cameras to map a route out as she fled Amygdala for the FBI offices. But in the blink of an eye, Yuri was trailing her like an eye in the sky. It felt like a mix of Person of Interest and Batman’s Brother Eye, which is why Yuri commanded a usurious $50,000 fee. Rivas didn’t like the figure, but he paid it anyway so he could get his money’s worth. And so, Yuri began breaching Angela’s devices and their protective measures, garnering her full ID and using SMS locators to triangulate her position.
He even remote activated her phone when she tried to go dark, soaking it in like a savant as he listened to classical music. What made his encrypted project so disturbing was no one knew Yuri’s location other than his mom, who was none the wiser that her adult son was a cyber-terrorist, browsing search histories and monitoring thousands of people on and offline. Luckily, Angela killed Rivas and his thugs when they took her back to her apartment to get the evidence she had against Brad. But while Kimi‘s conclusion had Brad exposed and heading to jail, no one traced a thing back to Yuri.
One might imagine the cops used Yuri’s phone to find scandalous connections once they realized the Brad scandal was huge, but it’s never shown if they knew Rivas needed help. Angela didn’t know about Yuri either, so it seems he remained free as a cyber-predator for hire, spying with eyes and ears everywhere in a tech-dependant world.
See how Yuri remained free in Kimi, now available on HBO Max.
About The Author
