I wonder what reviews of the HBO Max thriller Kimi would look like if the prestigious name of director Steven Soderbergh were removed and any random name substituted. I’m willing to bet they wouldn’t be half so glowing. When less celebrated filmmakers do conventional genre movies, they’re likely to get ignored or kicked all over the place by critics, but when the revered auteur Soderbergh makes them, critics tie themselves in lyrical knots praising him:

Of all current Hollywood filmmakers, Soderbergh is the most physical, the one who comes the closest to the painterly ideal of touching the image. He has long been doing his own camera work (under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews) and also his own editing (as Mary Ann Bernard), and the way that he engages with his subject evokes a bodily music, something like dance — a cinematic swing. His new film, “Kimi” . . . has it. This comes as something of a pleasant surprise, because the movie’s substance isn’t apparent in its foreground — it’s built as an ordinary genre piece.

It certainly is built as an ordinary genre piece — so ordinary you’ll be reminded of other paranoid suspense films during the whole eighty-nine-minute running time, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and carrying on through countless descendants to 2021’s The Woman in the Window. It’s a movie written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man) about an agoraphobic computer tech named Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz) who works as a “voice stream interpreter.” Her job consists of listening to anonymous interactions with the Kimi smart speaker owners in order to eradicate errors in Kimi’s software. In the course of her work, she overhears what sounds like a violent assault on a woman, almost buried under a wall of sound. Stonewalled by the corporate officials she contacts, Angela is finally forced to leave her apartment to report the crime, with predictably harrowing results.