Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice begins with an apology: Lost in an Instagram trance in her cramped big-city apartment, aspiring influencer (and part-time cocktail waitress) Frida (Naomi Ackie) alights on a viral video containing the regrets of a recently canceled A-lister—a chiseled, charming big-tech mogul whose name, Slater King (Channing Tatum), suggests a distinctly millennial vintage of hipster royalty. While the disgraced ex-CEO’s transgressions are never specified—in either his interview or the various Wikipedia pages Frida clicks through afterward—it seems that he definitely has something to be sorry for, primarily something involving his conduct with the opposite sex. Hardly a shocker—most power brokers have skeletons in their closet—but when they’re a dead ringer for Magic Mike, it’s that much easier for a social media rubbernecker like Frida to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The question of what a plugged-in, perpetually doomscrolling society does with hypothetically monstrous men—especially (in)famous ones who throw themselves on the mercy of the court of public opinion—is at the heart of Blink Twice , which was originally written in 2017 and entitled Pussy Island. In this context, Kravitz’s film could be categorized as a cautionary thriller: a post-Weinstein, post-Epstein meditation on seduction, complicity, and the slippery slope of forgiveness — themes that have lost none of their urgency in the intervening years. In fact, such zeitgei.