Blink Twice review – righteous fury in paradise

Zoë Kravitz makes her directorial debut with this gutsy thriller about a dream vacation that quickly takes a dark turn.

The paradoxical nature of memory means we are at once hyperaware of its fallibility and yet convinced of its sturdiness. We trust our memories to tell us who we are and where we came from – but we also know that memory is slippery and subject to change. The human brain tends to block out traumatic events and what is fact in one person’s mind may sincerely be recalled as fiction in another. Yet at our most primal, we learn what to fear and what to embrace through lived experience. We depend on our memories to keep us safe. Who can we trust if we can’t trust ourselves?

This question has taken on particular pertinence in the seven years since MeToo rocked Hollywood, with accounts of endemic sexual abuse in the film industry subject to the same scrutiny many victims know all too well: What were you wearing? Had you been drinking? Did you flirt with them? Did you say no? Did you fight back? Why didn’t you fight back? Are you sure it was rape? To be a victim of sexual assault is to be asked to bare your soul, to strip naked and subject yourself to public scrutiny. If you’re anything but the ideal sympathetic victim, forget about it. And then, at the end of it, you probably won’t get justice anyway. Maybe it’s best to forget after all.

“Forgetting is a gift,” Tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum) assures Frida (Naomi Ackie) after mentioning his own traumatic childhood and that he can’t remember very much about the first few years of his life. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, and on his private island where champagne flows freely and every hour is happy hour, it’s a phone-and-frown-free zone. For Frida it’s a dream come true. She’s miles away from her dingy apartment and dead-end waitressing job, partying in paradise with her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) and a gaggle of new gal pals, including Heather (Trew Mullen) Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Sarah (Adria Arjona). Most exciting of all is her ongoing flirtation with King himself, a sensitive-seeming “changed man” following some sort of public scandal that hangs on the film’s periphery – reminiscent of the way the rich and powerful seem to never be far from a redemption arc.

King surrounds himself with men who look, think and act like him, from his old friends Cody (Simon Rex), Vic (Christian Slater) and Tom (Hayley Joel Osment) to his mentee, the wide-eyed wunderkind Lucas (Levon Hawke) – they’re all variations on a theme, boisterous and braggadocious, here for a good time not a long time. The only women on staff are Slater’s slightly frazzled assistant Stacy (Geena Davis) who scurries around fixing gift bags and moving furniture on her boss’s whim, and the indigenous housekeeper (María Elena Olivares, credited as “Badass Maid”) who speaks no English apart from saying “Red Rabbit” over and over when she meets Frida.

That’s the first reference to The Shining, clearly a core text for Kravitz, and let’s be honest – there are worse directors to crib from than Kubrick. The idyllic hacienda’s (which is a real hotel located just out of Merida, Mexico, by the way) red façade and careful symmetry evoke memories of The Overlook’s austere architecture, and then there’s the isolation touted as a positive before common sense returns from a brief vacation.

Hollywood reacted to the MeToo crisis the way it reacts to every supposed sea change moment: by capitalising on the issue before assuming the hard work was done. A flood of films either directly or indirectly addressing the issue of sexual assault followed, and then, inevitably, nothing really changed. Maybe now it’s just an open secret that women are held in contempt by the entertainment industry. Blink Twice reflects the reality that when powerful men are found to be guilty of wrongdoing, they apologise and all is forgiven. They find new, insidious ways to abuse their status. The moments of violence in Kravitz’s film are a shocking contrast from the sunbleached paradise; blood drips onto the pristine matching sundresses all the women wear, the “Badass Maid” holds a dead lash viper aloft triumphantly. Like bad memories slipping through the cracks, it doesn’t take that long to realise something is very, very wrong.

As viewers, it’s easy to see the red flags a mile away and so will the women to run for their lives – and perhaps they should be a little more suspicious of Slater King’s spontaneous hospitality, given the reality of existing as a woman is learning very quickly that nothing comes for free. But when the good life finally comes calling, it’s hard to resist dipping a toe in. When Frida gazes at Slater, it’s not clear if she wants to dance with him or devour him and absorb his power for herself. Ackie fleshes out a somewhat underwritten heroine with her magnetic performance; she’s charismatic and klutzy with an uncommon expressiveness, a perfect foil to Adria Arjona’s more traditional badass (her character proudly refers to her eight seasons on the reality show ‘Hot Survivor Babes’) and Alia Shawkat’s familiar but not unwelcome laconic stoner girl.

The chemistry and camaraderie between the female characters is one of Blink Twice’s most welcome elements. Initially threatening to pit the women against each other, a rug-pull Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum pull off is a solidarity that doesn’t feel unearned or cringe in the maelstrom of Hollywood faux-feminism we’ve also been subject to since 2017. It feels natural because the actresses themselves are naturals – even when the script throws in a line that seems tailor-made for the trailer edit, they sell every line.

But there are some internal logic issues in the third act that shouldn’t be glossed over, and the positioning of the island’s Indigenous staff to near silent but seemingly all-knowing beings feels like a misstep, making them complicit in the actions of their employer. Considering three of the women in the main cast are non-white, it feels like a missed opportunity to explore the relationship between marginalised people, or at the very least to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance that can occur when visiting another country. Instead Blink Twice operates very much in the vein of the exploitations films of yore, focusing more on the action and catharsis than a grand takeaway.

Perhaps that’s the point. As America Ferrera said in Barbie, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.” As Charli XCX said in Girl, So Confusing, “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.” But while Gerwig’s expression of female solidarity was tailor-made for TikToks and Charli’s song about never being sure if Lorde likes her culminated in them teaming up to make the internet go crazy, Blink Twice feels angrier. And why not? When you have to exist in a world that was not designed for you and face continual animosity and violation for resisting, sometimes it feels like the only option is a primal scream. It’s no coincidence that Kravitz’s centrepiece needle drop in Blink Twice is Beyoncé’s ‘I’M THAT GIRL’ (a coup, too, as Beyoncé is notoriously picky about who she licenses her music to). The song, which opened her 2022 album RENAISSANCE, serves as a mission statement and a response, referring to her “Un-American Life” and the continued (at this point laughable) attempts to define her by her husband.

It’s a bold announcement as a filmmaker for Zoë Kravitz, who shows an inherent cine-literacy as well as a refreshing playfulness. Where most actors-turn-directors choose to create projects for themselves to star in or thinly veiled personas, Kravitz has gone a different way, crafting a film quite unlike anything in her back catalogue but possessing the same spiritedness that introduced her all the way back in 2012 when she played Toast the Knowing in Mad Max: Fury Road. There are some rough edges here that one might expect from a first-time director, but as a statement of intent, it’s more than promising. Arriving in the dog days of summer it’s an exhilarating and slick thriller, weaponising Channing Tatum’s comforting all-American charm not a month after his much-celebrated cameo in Deadpool and Wolverine.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Blink Twice is that its message of female solidarity feels sincere without being cynically corporate. Rather than patting itself on the back for highlighting the importance of women’s relationships, there’s an understanding that women are not a monolith, and embracing each other’s complexities enables us to fight structural inequality better. But in the meantime, doesn’t it feel kind of good to just let that anger fly?

Published 22 Aug 2024

Tags: Blink Twice Zoe Kravitz