Blink Twice is a fascinating, bold, intense, psychological thriller; the type that could only be made by a first-time director who doesn’t care about following traditional genre rules. Zoë Kravitz, making her debut behind the camera, seems to have made exactly the movie she wanted to, exactly how she wanted to. It starts out looking like one thing: a fantasy with darkness lurking behind it. It ends up being that and a bunch of other things. The story (which Kravitz cowrote) is extremely difficult to discuss without giving anything away. Suffice it to say that there are twists and they are likely what you’re expecting. However, the straight narrative isn’t as significant as what Kravitz is attempting to do from a thematic perspective.
Purely on the level of suspense, this is pretty impressive. Kravitz creates a sense of dread in her paradise. People seem to be having fun, yet then why does it feel so ominous? The answer to the mystery is really the only thing it could have been. Blink Twice (97 minutes, without the end credits) works or doesn’t work based on what it does with the consequences of that reveal, for both the perpetrators and the victims.
Though that did work for me (even the overly cynical ending that raises more questions than it answers), I couldn’t help thinking about the issues Kravitz didn’t address, specifically race, which feels obvious and gets completely avoided. The main character, a black woman, has been ignored her whole life. Now her, and a couple of other women of color, are in a position to be seen by a group of rich white men, who respond by taking advantage of them. Kravitz instead focuses on the gender politics, an aspect I found to be successful, even if her approach is equal parts messy and predictable.
Frida is a woman trying to find herself. She becomes intrigued by disgraced billionaire Slater King, a philanthropist who has been living on an island after being canceled for abuse of power, which sounds like sexual misconduct of some kind, but who has apologized his way back toward respectability. While catering a gala in Slater’s honor with her friend Jess, Frida catches his eye. He invites the two of them to join his group on his private island for a wild party. Amid a haze of drugs and alcohol, everyone says they are having a good time. Yet things seem vaguely sinister in a deeply unsettling way. Is this the trip of a lifetime? Or are Frida and Jess in danger?
Channing Tatum is a great choice to play Slater because his charm can come off as so effortless. Here, he’s dialed down so that his charm carries with it the possibility that the reformed Slater isn’t real. We know he has done something bad to women. Has he changed? Or did he just learn how to appear to have changed? Tatum keeps both of those options alive at the same time in a performance that takes ample advantage of his star persona, even if the character’s blank spots are never satisfactorily filled in all the way.
The same can be said for Frida, played very well by Naomi Ackie. Always feeling like a nobody, she is thunderstruck by Slater’s attention. Her desperate need for someone “important” to see her makes it harder for her to suspect that anything’s wrong. Her arc is pretty good. As is the one for Adria Arjona’s Sarah, a former reality show star set up as a competitor for Slater’s affections.
Blink Twice has a female empowerment angle to it that is only sort of convincing, but I did like its attempt at female solidarity. Some reviews are saying Kravitz chickened out by not clearly showing the horror occurring on the island (there are just a few quick glimpses). Would that have made her points stronger? Or would that have made this feel exploitative? I lean toward the latter. Though there are a lot of things she could have done differently here, this is the movie she made. It is a weird production, with thin characters, odd tonal shifts and a message that hits as often as it doesn’t. It is successful enough as a thriller and the passion of Zoë Kravitz to tell this story this way overcomes a lot of the messiness.
3½ out of 5
Cast:
Naomi Ackie as Frida
Channing Tatum as Slater
Alia Shawkat as Jess
Adria Arjona as Sarah
Christian Slater as Vic
Simon Rex as Cody
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
Written by Zoë Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum
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