In her spoiler-free review, Yasmin Omar digs into the actress-turned-director’s immaculately designed ‘eat the rich’ movie, which is deeply indebted to social-media trends.
At the London premiere of her directorial debut, Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz took to the stage and, incongruously, said she’d keep her introduction ‘very demure, very cutesy, very mindful’. It was a reference to the recent TikTok trend, which, like most digital fads, immediately lost its allure when the grown-ups began explaining it in mainstream media. At first blush, her remark felt like a slightly desperate millennial lunge towards Gen Z relevance. But, after watching the film, it clicks into place. Kravitz’s twisty psychological thriller Blink Twice is stuffed with internet buzzwords – Michelin meals ‘hit different’, brunch is ‘so fucking real’ – and pays lip service to a number of fashionable topics (‘eat the rich’ anticapitalism, female empowerment, therapy, wellness…). She clearly spends a lot of time online, and her film reflects that.
In fact when we first meet its main character, Naomi Ackie’s Frida, she is tellingly scrolling through her Instagram feed, pants around her ankles on the toilet. Her algorithm has served her a video from disgraced billionaire Slater (Channing Tatum), who stepped down from his tech company after abuses of power were made public, and is now licking his wounds on his very own private island.
Frida, it turns out, is about to waitress at Slater’s fundraising gala and, following her shift, changes into a figure-hugging red gown and joins the party. Unaccustomed to walking in heels, she trips and falls, leaving broken-glass shards and her dignity scattered across the high-gloss marble floor. Slater, haloed by an angelic white light, comes to her aid and – much joking, flirting and carousing later – invites her and her housemate (Alia Shawkat) to stay with him on his island, a WiFi-less, utterly secluded tropical utopia. They giddily, unthinkingly accept.
Blink Twice (2024)
Blink Twice is about images and image-making – its title treatment flicks on screen at the shuttering of a Polaroid camera – and Kravitz has a keen eye for creating beautiful ones. The production design is immaculate; Slater’s palatial home appears to be ripped from the pages of a particularly tasteful Architectural Digest spread, with its emphasis on that clean-cut minimalism familiar to the wealthy alongside the odd personality-lending pop of colour. The shot composition, too, is considered and artful. At one point Frida and Slater are framed, The Graduate-style, through a sunbather’s crooked leg; at another, a trio of face-masked women turn their heads in unison just so, producing a perfect diagonal line.
There are several tidily packaged montages – honing in on the sensual pleasures of crunching on toast, inhaling a joint – that scan like wonky tourism-board adverts. When the island’s female guests, all dressed in identical, bacchanalia-implying Roman tunics, waft around the swimming pool after dark it’s as if we’ve been granted access to a music-video wrap party. (On the subject of music, the soundtrack is an excellent mix of party-starting disco bangers, plus one hell of a Beyoncé needle-drop.)
Blink Twice (2024)
Trouble inevitably encroaches on this paradise, as we know it will. When making thrillers, filmmakers simply don’t clothe women in diaphanous white dresses unless they’re going to stain them. A nagging sense that something’s wrong becomes increasingly pronounced: Frida finds sticky strands of human hair knotted in a lip-gloss tube; venomous snakes slither underfoot despite the staff continually bagging them up; the power generator goes down, necessitating creepy candlelight.
Most disturbing, though, is that Frida and co wake up each morning without any memory of the night before, but with worrying traces of what might have happened (bruises, black eyes, bloody noses, dirty fingernails). Kravitz relishes tipping the film’s easy languorousness further and further off balance until – at last! – it topples into full-blown anarchy. I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the movie’s startling, narrative-resetting revelation, but suffice it to say that things are a lot darker, and a lot nastier, than they initially seem.
Blink Twice (2024)
The shift stirs up a whole new set of emotions, which gives the cast more to work with. Blink Twice has a large ensemble that includes Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment, Adria Arjona… It’s actually so large that there are more players than worthy material to play. Several of the actors never get their moment, and remain stuck in the starting blocks waiting for the pistol. Ackie, often boxed into supporting roles, holds her own in the lead, her expressive eyes guiding us through the story’s dramatic beats.
Tatum, for his part, is the shadow that looms over the film and, by its end, sinks into a wildly different register from his usual, dumb-hot-guy schtick. The true standout, however, is Arjona who portrays Sarah, a former contestant in eight seasons of the lightly misogynist reality show Hot Survivor Babes. Dangerously seductive in this summer’s Hit Man (2023), here the performer shows us just how funny she can be. Arjona’s wincing reaction to throwing back a fatally strong shot, and her lengthening out of vowels as she bellows ‘fat blunt!’, are marvellous. Plus, when the time comes, she matches the third act’s building intensity.
Blink Twice (2024)
Kravitz, an actress herself, evidently has a talent for casting and is able to draw out unexpected traits in her performers. She smartly uses our associations of an actor to wrongfoot us with their character’s off-brand behaviour. What she’s less skilled at is screenwriting. Blink Twice feels indebted to a number of extremely contemporary screen entertainments. It has the mystery of Glass Onion (2022), the haute cuisine of The Menu (2022), the class satire of Triangle of Sadness (2022), the rich-bashing of The White Lotus (2021–).
This isn’t to say that she copied these works (she started developing the script in 2017) or, even if she did, that that’s automatically a criticism (Quentin Tarantino famously ‘steals from every movie ever made’). But when dealing with topics that are right in the centre of the zeitgeist, you have to offer a point of difference, a reason your story matters. Blink Twice doesn’t interrogate its ideas thoroughly enough and, with themes as gravely serious as those gestured to in the second half, that comes across as flippant, almost irresponsible. The film is much like the social-media platforms whose parlance it has swallowed: a lacquered, curated irreality that’s fun to spend time with – but might just end up being very bad for you.
WATCH BLINK TWICE IN CINEMAS
