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 zeitgeist surfacing is almost mandatory in contemporary American genre cinema, especially films made in the shadow—or, more precisely, under the influence—of Jordan Peele’s Get Out , which offered filmmakers a veritable how-to manual for entwining B-movie malevolence with grad-school metaphor until they feel like a single entity.
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There’s also a running motif involving photographs that rhymes slyly with Peele’s classic. In Get Out , the flashing of a camera was revealed as a way to subvert the mind-controlling tactics of the bad guys: In being blinded by the light, the characters were able to see. Here, the pileup of Polaroids ostensibly depicting a trip to paradise is similarly used to help delineate the gap between fantasy and reality.
Speaking of fantasy: Not only is Slater a dreamboat, but he’s also a gentleman, gallantly coming to Frida’s aid when she trips over her own broken high heels at a gala being held in his honor. Frida’s supposed to be working the bar, but she and her coworker-slash-roommate, Jess (Alia Shawkat), simply can’t resist the possibility of cozying up to all that wealth and power. Quickly—and somewhat inexplicably—they find themselves on the inside of their host’s glamorous inner circle.
One alcohol-soaked montage later, Slater has a proposition for his new pals: come away with him to the private island he’s purchased in the hopes that five-star seclusion will help him walk the path of penitence in designer flip-flops. The one catch: The guests have to check their cellphones at the door—there’s no reception out here in the middle of the ocean, and they’d only distract from all the fun anyway. Suffice it to say that Kravitz and her cowriter, E.
T. Feigenbaum, are laying it on pretty thick here, but a case can be made that such all-caps ominousness is part of the movie’s point. Frida and Jess sense that something is weird about Slater and his companions—who separate nicely into two categories, pale, geeky betas and statuesque females—but they’re too entranced by their beautiful new surroundings to care, not to mention blissed out on a cocktail of weed, alcohol, and psychotropics (which later are dispensed only on the condition that the girls use them “with intention”).
“Are you having fun?” Slater asks Frida, who’s smiling too widely to answer—she’s so happy, she looks like she’s been lobotomized. One way of reading these scenes is as a form of self-implicating critique from a filmmaker raised in a celebrity bubble, and Kravitz shows alertness as a satirist: She shoots the sunbaked, well-coiffed debauchery as hallucinatory slapstick, riffing smartly on the bikini-clad libertinism of Spring Breakers . No less than Harmony Korine, Kravitz recognizes the line between vicarious exhilaration and hypnotic monotony and makes a point of crossing it over and over again.
After a while, watching half-naked beach bunnies getting stoned and chasing each other in the moonlight gets boring, including for them; while Frida leans into the loop of excess, Jess decides she wants to stop the ride. Related It’s around this point that Blink Twice stops playing games with genre tropes and starts capitulating to them. The problem isn’t in the performances, which are solid across the board—and considerably better than that in the case of Tatum, who’s perfectly cast as a sexy, emotionally opaque stud in a movie conceived by his life partner—or even in the filmmaking.
As evidenced by her recent stint in the Criterion Closet , Kravitz is a cinephile, and she imbues several sequences with a genuine sense of paranoid style, especially in terms of the sound design, which keeps dropping hints about what’s lurking behind (and beneath) all that lush greenery. She’s also good with color, emphasizing the literal (and) figurative whiteness of the guests while drenching certain close-ups in crimson (shades of M. Night Shyamalan’s exercise in cloistered, color-coded ambiguity in The Village ).
Leaving aside any spoilers, there’s plenty of red-blooded violence and gore in the homestretch, and some of it is satisfyingly nasty. But the effect is still weirdly muted: The action doesn’t whip up the righteous fury of the climax of Get Out , and the anodyne vibes run deeper as well. For a movie like this to work, the characters have to be more than stand-ins for larger issues or ideas—there has to be something at stake in their peril beyond plot points.
Ackie has striking, expressive features that she can skillfully modulate into masks of fear and desire, but Frida is a cipher, defined strictly by a yearning not to be “invisible” that leads her to put herself on display for the dudes rocking all around her. The characterization makes sense on a conceptual level—as does the prematurely embittered ex-reality-TV starlet played by Adria Arjona, who’s riding shotgun with Slater’s gooniest buddy (the excellent Simon Rex)—but never as more than that. It’s hard to tell a story about characters being mind-fucked into compliance when the screenplay keeps maneuvering them into contrived situations.
Given her project, it’s interesting—and risky—that Kravitz recently spoke up about her respect for the movies of Roman Polanski, telling an interviewer that “it’s OK that somebody bad was involved in something good.” What’s finally deflating about Blink Twice is how it accidentally inverts that equation: It’s so determined to let us know it’s on the right side of its topic that it sidesteps the kind of insidious, sinister contradictions that distinguish the most unsettling thrillers—including Rosemary’s Baby (which was also an inspiration point for Peele). That movie’s aura of latent, unspeakable evil transcends allegory or analysis; it feels haunted from the inside out.
Blink Twice is sleek and even sophisticated in its examination of the relationship between institutionalized and internalized misogyny—the same tension at the core of Rosemary’s Baby —but it’s also too easily reduced to a commentary. Kravitz is trying to craft a movie that’s simultaneously defiant and detached, wide-eyed and winking. That her aims don’t totally cancel themselves out suggests something of her talent as well as her ambition, even if in the end, this movie about the dangers of forgetting fades from memory the moment the lights go up.
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