There’s nothing subtle about the eat-the-rich message at play in Blink Twice, the horror-thriller that adds “director” to the list of hyphenates for actor-producer-writer-model Zoë Kravitz (The Batman, Kimi). This is the kind of movie where people talk in declaratory speeches, or let silent tears and brandished knives do the talking for them. Its statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blaring and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that absolutely seems to be the movie’s primary point.
Blink Twice is a story designed to make people angry, then give them a focus for their rage. Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum are aiming to provoke recognition and righteous fury, and they rarely pull their punches. But they’re working in a mode that’s become so familiar with other recent movies that it’s hard for Kravitz and Feigenbaum to find distinctive ground of their own.
Actor Naomi Ackie is their primary weapon in that particular war. Ackie makes a compelling, empathy-inducing lead as Frida, a catering-company wage-slave facing a choice between making rent, or making a move on her unlikely crush object, ultra-wealthy tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum). Slater has recently been embroiled in some kind of scandal, and he’s on a standard-issue media-assisted image-rehabilitation tour that includes public apologies, the promise “I’m working on myself,” and some envy-evoking references to getting back to nature on his private island, where he’s growing his own crops and raising his own chickens.
He’s also partying hard with his inner circle. Frida manages to catch Slater’s appreciative eye while she’s supposed to be working at his company’s glitzy annual gala, and soon she and her roommate and best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) are on a luxe private plane to that private island. They’re joined by a handful of Slater’s own besties, mostly played by familiar faces — Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment as two of his work buds; Kyle MacLachlan as his therapist; Geena Davis as his eager-to-please assistant. And then there are the other women on board, Hot Survivor Babes champion Sarah (Adria Arjona) and giggly party girls Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen).
As soon as they get to the island, the champagne, pot, and designer drugs start flowing, between rounds of gourmet food, daily pool parties, and hedonistic lounging. Except… while Frida tries to signal her interest in hooking up with Slater, and Sarah keeps glowering competitively as if she wants him for herself, somehow the nights keep blurring by, and sex never enters the picture.
There’s more to it. Frida’s housekeeper is behaving oddly. Poisonous snakes keep turning up. Frida doesn’t know how she keeps getting clotted dirt under her custom animal-design nails. Something’s terribly wrong, Jess suggests, and they don’t know what. The answer is dark enough that Amazon MGM Studios issued an official trigger warning, not wanting audiences to get caught by surprise.
Approaching Blink Twice as a Big Twist movie will just leave viewers disappointed: The Big Twist is fairly obvious, heavily telegraphed, and not really the point. The point is what women do in a situation where men appear to have all the status, power, and leverage — and the question of why so many men throughout history have wielded those things in such predictable ways.
It’s certainly no coincidence that most of Slater’s tech-bro buds are white-presenting rich dudes, while Frida and the other women are all lower class, women of color, or both. The power inequity of class, gender, and race is painted all over Blink Twice in the vivid reds and stark black-and-whites that also define Slater King’s décor aesthetic at that annual company gala.
And yet the movie doesn’t approach any of these things with nuance or careful craft. There’s certainly potential to the setup, but Kravitz and Feigenbaum are working in the shadow of many similar recent movies, including The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story, and the disastrously mishandled Don’t Worry Darling. Like all those movies, Blink Twice first revels in the privileged, glamorous lives of the super-rich, then indulges in the fantasy of interrupting those lives with well-justified violence. But in an era of constantly growing wealth inequality, where roughly every third thriller villain is some form of tech bro, it takes more than a basic “dudes bad, wealth bad, power corrupts” message to make a movie stand out.
Kravitz and Feigenbaum get a long way on striking images and style, and on tapping into relatable frustrations. Frida and Jess’ situation is certainly understandable: They just want to escape rent concerns, their skeevy boss, and their dead-end jobs for a while. The movie’s entire engine runs on anger about how easily those things come into the hands of certain kinds of smug, self-justifying, endlessly entitled men, while women (and particularly women of color) have to pay a heavy toll to attain the same goals. Tatum’s amused, warm charisma, set against Ackie’s convincing welter of emotions at the situation she’s in, gives that anger a focus and a face.
But it doesn’t give it much depth. In the last 10 minutes or so, Blink Twice suddenly comes into focus, with a too-brief moment of clarity and creativity that steps outside all the similar movies from the last few years. Suddenly, it feels like the movie has a more specific point of view, and a much sharper and more incisive edge. If that kind of intentionality and specificity stretched throughout more of the movie, Blink Twice would be a real conversation piece. As it is, it’s just the latest film to tell a familiar story about men vs. women, haves vs. have-nots, and how cathartic it can be to imagine a bloody response to societal problems that rarely come within knifing range.
Blink Twice is in theaters now.
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