‘Stylish and savage enough to gain a cult following’

Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut is full of “smart ideas, contentious themes, cool images and striking sequences” – but does it work as a compelling thriller?

Zoe Kravitz is known for acting in The Batman and Divergent – and for being the daughter of Lenny Kravitz. But her promising debut film as a director and co-writer suggests that she could become better known for her new career. Blink Twice is a mind-bending black comedy-thriller about a young woman, Frida (Naomi Ackie), who is invited to join a tech billionaire, Slater King (Channing Tatum, Kravitz’s boyfriend), on his private island. She and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) can hardly believe their luck as they enjoy the fine wines, culinary delicacies and designer drugs that King and his courtiers provide, but, as the days and nights blur into one long indulgent haze, they realise that they are having mysterious bouts of memory loss.

It might help if viewers had some memory loss, too. As distinctive as Blink Twice is in some respects, it’s unfortunately reminiscent of several films from the past couple of years. The most obvious one is the Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, which had another untrustworthy, new-age-babbling tech tycoon treating his friends to a luxurious stay on his own island, and we’ve had plenty of other dark satires with similar scenarios, including Triangle of Sadness, The Menu and Infinity Pool. Beyond those, the too-good-to-be-true setting has echoes of Don’t Worry Darling, while the mordant fable of an outsider being allowed into a bubble of ridiculous privilege even recalls Saltburn.

There are also some marked resemblances to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which was released in 2017, but all the other films mentioned above came out in 2022 and 2023, so Blink Twice has the faintly stale whiff of a project that is past its sell-by date. It would have had to be truly exceptional not to seem as if it had come late to the party – and it isn’t truly exceptional. Mind you, it sometimes gets pretty close.

Blink Twice gets off to an intriguing and wickedly funny start when Kravitz and her co-writer, ET Feigenbaum, establish King’s back story in the most contemporary of ways: Frida reads news articles and watches interviews on her phone while she’s sitting on the toilet. It turns out that his career was derailed when he committed some unspecified wrongdoing, but a few apologies and some ostentatious philanthropy have put all that in the past. “You really are a changed man,” coos an obsequious interviewer.

The wily comedy continues when Frida and Jess are pouring champagne at King’s annual charity gala – one of those so-called fundraisers which are so lavish that they cost more money than they raise. The women then swap their waitress uniforms for evening gowns and mingle with the affluent guests, a ruse that goes so well that the handsome and apparently gallant King is soon introducing Frida to his best buddies, a trio of parasitic doofuses played amusingly by Christian Slater, Simon Rex and Haley Joel Osment. Countless glasses of champagne later, everyone is flying by private jet to a tropical paradise with a palatial villa at its heart. Never mind that the women on the flight – including Sarah, played by Adria Arjona – are considerably younger than most of the men. And never mind that Frida and Jess haven’t had time to pack: their rooms come equipped with perfectly fitting white dresses and bikinis. “I don’t think it’s weird,” argues Jess. “It’s… rich.”

On the island, Kravitz achieves an almost perfect balance between how enviable the holiday is, and how unsettling it is, between how sophisticated the men seem at some points, and how dangerously stupid they seem at others. You can see why Frida might find the bros’ swanky lifestyle ridiculous, but you can also see why she would be happy to partake of that lifestyle herself, despite some hilariously spooky warning signs: Kravitz makes sinister use of the smiling servants who can be spotted in the background, killing the venomous snakes that crawl through King’s Eden. The viewer, too, can enjoy all the sumptuously shot, richly coloured opulence while knowing that something bad is going to happen soon.

It doesn’t happen soon enough, though. There are some bursts of psychedelic weirdness, but the lazing-by-the-pool montages become rambling and repetitive, and the foreshadowing becomes so blatant that many viewers will guess the big twist an hour before it’s revealed. When the memory-loss plot eventually gets going, Kravitz seems determined to make up for lost time. The tone swings wildly between farcical silliness and upsetting grimness, and there are so many points being made about trauma, amnesia, white privilege, cancel culture, the super-rich and sexual exploitation that the concepts overwhelm the plot. Muddled by all its time jumps and memory gaps, Blink Twice is less successful as a compelling thriller than as a collection of smart ideas and contentious themes, of cool images and striking sequences, of dialogue that will be quoted and clips that will become memes.

As cluttered as it is, though, Blink Twice is stylish and savage enough to gain a cult following. And it is undoubtedly the work of a skilled writer-director, rather than an actor who is having a go at directing. Kravitz has elicited terrific performances from all of the cast (Ackie, Shawkat and Arjona, especially), she has constructed some satisfyingly gruesome retribution for the villains, and the finale wraps things up brilliantly. If Kravitz decides to make a sequel called Blink Thrice, it might be even better. 

Blink Twice is released on 23 August