Take away MGM backing, Channing Tatum, and the fact that it will hit a few thousand screens this weekend, and Zoe Kravitz’s Blink Twice looks a hell of a lot like a SXSW acquisition title that made its way to Tubi than something deserving of a platform release. This isn’t to say that it’s wholly bad – indeed, there’s a solid amount to like here – but the pacing, style, and subject matter feel built for festival discourse and a general dissolution into the ether or the public sphere once those heady two weeks are a distant memory. It’s Kravitz’s debut feature, which means there are going to be some show-offy attempts to show that she deserved this call-up to the majors and a broad swing for the thematic fences that winds up in the catcher’s mitt no matter how hard she swings at it. But the truth is, there is a lot of promise here once the film begins to open up and Kravitz abandons the need to impress the audience with f-i-l-m-m-a-k-i-n-g, demonstrating a genuine swagger in the way she steers her ensembles’ performances and edits around them. Blink Twice gets fun and shows a lot of real promise that Kravitz should direct again she’d make a film that’s entertaining enough to sustain a 100-minute runtime, but the problem is that it takes an hour to get there.
Originally titled Pussy Island, which should clue you into exactly what’s going on here, Blink Twice follows Frida (Naomi Ackie), an average person with everyday problems who comes into contact with a billionaire and falls under his spell. She’s drawn to him, for whatever reason, while scrolling through social media videos, where she sees him apologize for some bad behavior in classic IG tech-bro fashion, and her curiosity is well-stoked. Lucky for her, she and her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat) are part of a catering staff’s table service team and will be busing tables and pouring champagne for that mogul’s very company! Once they’re done with work, the two dress up in some manner of finery and pretend to be a part of the monied elite, which they don’t fit in with, but through some slapstick, she winds up face to face with the man himself, Slater King (Channing Tatum), the enigmatic rich man from the video. After his “cancellation,” he went and bought himself an island for him and his boys to hang out and do lots of fucking drugs at under the guise of wellness, as the company can pretty much run itself. They have a quick meet-cute and spend the night getting to know each other at the party. When the lights come up, and the museum staff tells them they have to go home, he springs an invitation on her: You and your roommate should come with me to my private island. Sure, you’ve never met me before, and I’ve just gotten accused of bad shit, but maybe I’ve changed?
The answer, of course, is that he hasn’t. After a few drug-fueled days of partying, Frida begins to notice some strange stuff. There’s always dirt under her fingernails. She always feels like shit in the mornings. The grounds crew seems to be watching them with a strange bemusement. The days begin to bleed into each other, a drug-fueled orgy of good food, rich boy antics, and bonding time with her and the other women on the island. One of them, a former reality show survivalist named Sarah (Adria Arjona), seems to be vying for Slater’s attention and the two butt heads for a little while. But then something happens that Frida can’t fully parse: Jess, after getting bit by a snake, suddenly vanishes from the island, and absolutely no one can remember her. Sarah’s the only person who even vaguely has a memory of her – Sam’s name scrawled on her omnipresent and always-borrowed lighter –, and the two of them have to figure out exactly what the hell is going on before they’re the next to be forgotten and disappeared in the middle of the night. Things, of course, go poorly.
I could spend a decent chunk of this review complaining about the ending, which is one of the most misjudged satirical applications of cool-girl-triumph narratives to real-world events that I’ve seen in quite some time, but that would undercut the worst and best things about Kravitz’s debut, which are less spoiler-filled to talk about and make up 95 percent of the movie as it is. See, the first 45 minutes of Blink Twice reminded me a lot of the Mulvaneys’ Woodshock, the A24 killer-weed Kirsten Dunst feature that lasted all of a week in cinemas back in ’17, in the way that it seemed to mistake heady vibes for style. Kravitz is aiming for a kind of light psychedelia to stress the dreamlike nature of the island and Frida’s headspace. Still, it’s never actually trippy enough to be compelling or engaging. We’re meant to be engrossed in the sensory depths that she’s going to with all of the psilocybin she’s ingesting alongside the freshly caught grouper and champagne cocktails at the poolside, and it just takes on the dimensions of a perfume commercial. Put some Mahler over it instead of a looped James Brown cut, and you’d wind up with a Gucci campaign, one that could come with a co-branded fragrance (perfume plays a surprisingly big part in this movie). This is to say: It is dully pretty, pleasant enough to witness yet devoid of any source of curiosity about what the narrative might hold in the future. We’ve seen the previews, we’ve read the trigger warnings, and we know some fucked up shit is going to happen: maybe limit the bacchanalia montage to a single three minutes next time.
On the flip side, maybe this is why the final 45 minutes work so much better: Knowing that she’s signed on to make a thriller, Kravitz flips, plays to her cast’s strengths, and brings a legitimate sense of humor out in the movie to go along with the would-be thrills. It’s got a deep bench: besides Tatum and Ackie, there’s Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan, Levon Hawke, and Vanyaland Actor of the Year 2021 winner Simon Rex to round out the cast. However, the crackling camaraderie that Ackie and Arjona achieve would be an envious asset to even an established director. Kravitz wisely pivots the entire orientation of the film to center their rapport, and one might forget about how fucking boring it was once the dominos start to fall, and heads start getting smashed with rocks. Tatum also gets to stretch his legs as a performer – typically, he’s locked into comic mode or sexy mode, but he gets to play a decent heel here and relishes the chance.
Had Kravitz seized on this propulsive energy from the get-go instead of trying to wow us with trippy visuals to cultivate an unearned sense of dread, maybe we’d have a genuinely entertaining – if very fucked up in the end – little comedy-thriller rather than 45 minutes of energy sandwiched between dull beginnings and the inevitable “I can’t believe this is the conclusion this movie reaches” conversations folks will have when they leave the theater. But such is the double-edged sword of ambition. It’s still an accomplishment to fly out in the majors, given that 99% of people, myself included, would eat shit at the plate for three pitches, but here’s to hoping her next at-bat is better.