Champagne, cocktails, and a luxury party. Put those in any order and it seems like a hit, but what if I added murder to that list? That’s , Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut which comes with plenty of glitz, glam, and a spine-tingling twist. The film, which is due to be released on 23 August, is a particularly personal project for Kravitz, who met her fiancé Channing Tatum while casting for the thriller.
Kravitz personally scouted the actor to star as Slater King in the movie, which also stars British actress Naomi Ackie. Actress and director Kravitz has been working on the project since 2017, telling , she ‘didn't feel like she would be able to handle trusting somebody else to bring this to life’. She explained, ‘By the time we were really talking about actually making the film, I could see this world and these characters so clearly in my mind.
’ Kravitz began shooting the film in 2022, and two years later it's almost ready for premiere. The plot follows a cocktail waitress named Frida (played by Ackie) and her friend Jess who are invited by tech billionaire, Slater King (Tatum), to his private island where he is hosting a lavish party. But all is not what it seems.
.. Speaking of his own process in creating the film's villainous main character, Channing said he would never tell anybody about what he had to ‘create’ inside his own mind to play the character.
He told 'He’s a psychopath'. Meanwhile Kravitz revealed she had wanted to create a situation where characters were completely ‘isolated’ from their ordinary life. She explained, ‘That, in my mind, is the scariest situation you could be in – whether you’re trapped in the back of a car, in a closet, or in a dark room at a party.
À la Lord of the Flies, I was trying to find an environment where the characters had to stay and deal with the crumbling of the power dynamics.’ Despite the dark nature of , it seems the set was the perfect place for the love story between Kravitz and Tatum to bloom. Speaking to Tatum revealed how working together had strengthened their relationship.
He said, 'Working with your partner truly is—you know, I know a lot of people are afraid of it—it was the thing that cemented us in a way. ‘We started, you know, kind of grew a little bit right before we started filming, and then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna go do this.’ It just brought us together.
' Perhaps poignantly, it was the premiere of the film in where the couple made their red carpet debut together as a couple for the first time. Whilst little may be known about the plot of the film as yet, the trailer teases a gory, thrilling ride. It starts on an ominous note, with a bloodied Tatum saying rather casually, ‘So, everybody’s dead.
How about we start at the beginning?’ Then a montage follows in which Tatum introduces a sequence of his friends: a colleague, a childhood friend, and others. All of them are male. He then introduces a character called Sarah to a character called Frida, where Frida meets a somewhat frosty reception.
As a montage depicts Frida and Jess’s arrival on the island, Frida mutters, ‘This is amazing’. But it seems obvious that everything is not going to work out for the best. In a moment of circumspection, Jess says ‘Did we just jet off to a billionaire’s island with a bunch of strangers?’.
The trailer then reveals that forgetting is an important part of the film. Guests seem unable to remember what is happening to them. And some begin to conspire in an attempt to unravel the secret of the island.
So what else can we expect from the film? described it as a combination of ‘ meets with maybe a bit of and thrown in’. If that is anything to go off, it is definitely something to look forward to..
