We all know something bad is going to happen from the start of Blink Twice, the writing and directing debut of Zoë Kravitz. That doesn’t make the majority of the film, spent with nail artist Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) as they delight in the private island of a startup billionaire, any less fun or inviting. Nor does it make the film’s reveal any less impactful.
Blink Twice hits beats we’ve seen many many times before. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, Frida and Jess are whisked away to the idyllic island by the ultra-wealthy Slater King (Channing Tatum, doing his best cult leader act). Days by the pool and nights filled with hallucinogens become the blissful norm until days lose all meaning. Once the days have lost meaning, concerns arise, and the secrets of the island can no longer be ignored.
Kravitz’s filmmaking imbues the movie with a fantastic sense of play as soon as the group, made up of three other women and King’s cadre of right hand men, arrives on the island. Sounds and images shift in and out of focus before the drug sequences even start. Alternating long takes of dance sequences with smoothly choreographed camera movements and more frenetically edited montages pull viewers into the all-consuming party of the island, leading us to lose sense of how long we’ve been on the island with the characters.
Those characters, or at least the cast, also make the island a wonderful place to spend time for the audience. Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osmont, Kyle Maclachlan, and Geena Davis lend their big names and boundless charm to the movie as members of King’s team. Trew Mullen and Liz Caribel deliver perfect bimbo performances as two of the other women, while Adria Arjona cements 2024 as the year she becomes a full blown movie star with her initially icy then hilarious performance here along with her turn in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man.
The utopian island is so inviting that the inevitable downturn isn’t just shocking for its brutality, but also because it feels as though it implicates the audience. The movie makes it impossible not to have fun so when that fun is ultimately undercut by a dark reality, we feel a sense of guilt for having enjoyed ourselves so much when things appeared joyous. While the reveal of what is going on isn’t the most unique, albeit it’s somewhat inventive, its intensity and abruptness make it genuinely stomach churning. In fact, it may honestly be too cruel as it toes the line of overwhelming viewers with bleakness. Everything that plays out after the turn is built on its initial shock, developing a sense of dread and edge of your seat tension that doesn’t let up until the final moment.
Like most genre films of the moment, Blink Twice has some things to say. Very explicit things about gender, wealth, and power, and some less explicit things about race. None of its ideas are novel or offensive. But some of them, particularly a smattering of dialogues in the finale, feel a bit too obvious, as if Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum are worried viewers may not get all the issues they’re attempting to tackle if they don’t make them as clear as possible.
A major studio release (the film is being distributed in the US by Amazon/MGM) leaning too hard on handholding dialogue is nothing new and doesn’t drag the film down too much. Its potentially too cruel finale, though, lands somewhere between its greatest strength as something truly shocking from a studio in the year 2024, and its greatest weakness as it may (fairly) sour some viewers on the entire experience. Or, like me, other viewers may not know exactly how they feel, and whether that’s a feature or a bug is up to them.
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