Blink Twice is a flawed but safe calling card for actor-turned director Zoe Kravitz, owing much to films that have come before and tread well-versed territory. It’s a film that sees two waiters at an elite corporation swept under the spell of “cancelled” celebrity Slater-King – Kravitz deploying modern pop culture cancellation expertly with Channing Tatum revelling in embracing the often fake, manufactured apologies that come out only when a celebrity is caught doing something wrong rather when they actually did something wrong, as one of Hollywood’s heartthrobs himself, he shines here. When the two girls find themselves on Slater King’s island that promises the art of healing through forgetting, it soon becomes apparent that not all is as it seems and they may have wondered into a trap that they cannot escape from.
Calling to mind Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and other recent, more critically acclaimed films, like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Blink Twice is more a “here, look how good I am as a director” than a good film in its own right as it shows how well Kravitz can master the cliches and the Hitchcockian level of suspense raising that gets under your skin from the word go. It’s a #MeToo thriller that lures you in, seductively and intrugingly, but feels like it ends just as it gets started – with the ending creating a sense of power induced by the 1% above us all. Naomi Ackie and Ali Shawkat are caught in its web, party girls who enjoy the endless hedonism at first but when things go wrong, Shawkat’s Jess goes missing and only Ackie’s Frida can remember her – all her new friends have completely forgotten her at all. Only what remains is the knife left behind her bathroom mirror that Frida remembers Jess telling her to hide somewhere, and the knowledge that Jess was bitten by a venomous snake. There’s something similar at work here that Blink Twice deploys expertly.
Co-writer and director Kravitz (working with ET Feigenbaum on the script) revels in raising the tension. Sound and colour are emphasised, it’s clear that colour is important from the moment you see that all the girls on the island are assigned the same clothes – and every sound feels like a gunshot so that when the actual gunshots happen, it feels like a firecracker. We know something is amiss before Frida does, and the rest of the film is spent wondering when Frida will catch up to the audience, it’s Jess that does first, poor, poor Jess – but you can see how well Frida is swept under its spell. Finally, something good has happened to her for once in her life – and she doesn’t want it to end. Days become uncountable, and all contact with the outside world is gone.
Blink Twice feels like a visual triumph with marvelling colours and pinpoint comedic and action timing – the scene in the trailers where Frida hides behind a desk that King scouts out with tension is masterfully timed and one of the tensest scenes you’ll see in any film this year. It feels a bit like we’ve seen it all before, but there’s a reason why this formula is so popular – and Kravitz daringly has something to say.
