Zoë Kravitz is the latest filmmaker to launch a career through the pipeline of B-flick-vehicled social commentary that’s defined genre cinema over the past ten years. Blink Twice has the patina of prestige horror, providing in its strongest moments dispositive evidence of the young actor-turned-director’s talent (not to mention some of the most unsettling images of occult depravity this side of Kubrick), but lush cinematography and slick match cuts fail to compensate for a story as thinly constructed as the lies a cocktail waitress entertains to not see that the apparently harmless New Age-y billionaires’ retreat where she finds herself is actually Epstein Island.
Aspirational influencer Frida (Naomi Ackie) is inexorably drawn to tech CEO Slater King (Channing Tatum). Allegations of impropriety—they’re never specified, but we can assume—don’t dissuade her infatuation, and that’s part of the film’s point about the magnetic allure of power and what we willfully ignore to stay in its proximity. After literally crashing a gala she’s waitressing with her best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), and getting noticed by the beleaguered mogul, Frida boards a jet to a private tropical paradise where champagne and gourmet food flow as freely as psychoactive substances that operate however the plot needs them to in any given moment. Their party includes a former contestant on a survivalist reality program (Adria Arjona, of recent Hit Man fame), a pervy chef (Simon Rex), and a photographer missing a pinky (Christian Slater). Mysterious bruises and dirty fingernails warn something wicked is afoot—and what’s up with the armed guard (Cris Costa) chaperoning them and King’s daffy assistant (Geena Davis) confiscating their phones?—but only Jess grows concerned that their newfound accommodations are in fact a trap.
Blink Twice aggregates trends that have emerged ever since Get Out unleashed a wave of heavily stylized, socially conscious, darkly satirical horror/thrillers and Promising Young Woman spackled them in candy colors, but the movie doesn’t evolve the formula, settling instead, like Fresh and Don’t Worry Darling, for imitation. Blink Twice is better than both, occasionally even making a persuasive case for Kravitz’s aesthetic sensibility rivaling that of a Peele, Fennell, or Aster—which is why the film’s creative lapses are all the more frustrating.
Equipped with a high-contrast color palette, sharp editing, ironic needle drops, and a fashionably delayed title card, Kravtiz’s distillate of genre cinema between now and the late 2010s inspires more faith in her judgment as a director than as a screenwriter. That being said, the film is quite funny, particularly once Ackie and Arjona pair up for a well-executed slapstick bit toward the third act. It’s in the finer details that the script falls apart.
Thanks to a backlash against ‘CinemaSins brain’, highlighting overly expedient plotting is treated as bad form in contemporary film criticism despite the valid distinction between refusing to suspend all disbelief and questioning the integrity of a story that plays fast and loose with its own mechanics. Only so many conveniences can be waved off before a pile amasses the height of a certain armchair that just doesn’t look right no matter where you put it. Blinking twice won’t make it go away; you’ll need to seal your eyes wide shut—or, as a gloriously boozed out Geena Davis at one point suggests, burn the damn thing.
Streaming Availability:Director: Zoë Kravitz
Cast: Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Alia Shawkat
Writers: Zoë Kravitz, E.T. Feigenbaum
Producers: Zoë Kravitz, Garret Levitz, Bruce Cohen, Tiffany Persons, Channing Tatum
Music: Chanda Dancy
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Editor: Kathryn J. Schubert
