It’s perhaps easy, as its doom gets to churning, to compare “Blink Twice” to its most obvious influence, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” There’s the general narrative structure that it hews to (guest to an isolated getaway soon finds things get weird), along with the creepy details it sometimes too blatantly cribs (the eerily soulless, nonwhite groundskeepers, the animal symbolism). But the directorial debut from Zoë Kravitz is influenced where it matters most, and takes what it borrows to tread its own ground: using a social thriller framework whose messaging cares less about being too aggressively incisive than being devilishly, disturbingly entertaining.
It’s a superbly punchy, if somewhat glib thrill ride that, before it reveals and morphs into the actual genre it falls under (to get specific would be to say too much, and what it eventually gets to is sure to invite some contentious discussion), might at first resemble another film entirely. That is, an iteration of the “Knives Out” cinematic universe, an eat-the-rich subgenre that has understandably ballooned in the last few years and produced some entertaining works but often without any real satisfying teeth.
The wealthy here is embodied by Slater King (Channing Tatum), a once disgraced tech billionaire who, we learn through a collage of news media, has reintroduced himself to society, reformed and kowtowing after past wrongdoings of some sort. (Tatum’s typically stilted range of expression conversely serves him well in this role as a man unconvincingly presenting a noble version of himself to the world.) What Slater’s transgressions were exactly aren’t specified, but this film, we’ll soon realize, is not about the sickly decadence of wealth, but about the capital-A abuse of power.
When Frida (Naomi Ackie), a cocktail server working at a gala thrown by Slater, manages to rub elbows with the tech king himself, they quickly hit it off. By the end of the night, Slater, seemingly charismatic and sensitive, invites Frida and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat, who makes a magnetic pair with Ackie) to join him and his posh cohort to his private island for a getaway vacation. Frida and Jess giddily hop on a private jet and are soon lounging by the pool by day, and melting their faces away by night on a cocktail of drugs. Booze and blunts are endless, and Slater, cozying up to Frida, is as gentlemanly as he is charming.
Of course, we know things are too good to be true. Each morning Frida wakes up in paradise, her memories of the night before are a blank slate. She begins to notice dirt mysteriously appearing under her fingernails. One afternoon, she realizes that Jess has disappeared, and none of the other women on the island can even recall who Jess is.
Kravitz (who co-wrote the film with E.T. Feigenbaum) has quite a bit of fun on a technical level, pushing many sleek buttons in the film’s sound design, music, and cinematography to ratchet up the tension and imbue the film with a wry stylistic verve before things get messy and bloody. It is, on a purely directorial craftsman’s level, a genuinely accomplished debut from Kravitz; what that handiwork builds up to, on a level of deeper ideas, can be up for debate.
As Frida panics about what happened to Jess, Sarah (Adria Arjona, solidifying herself as a star) comes to her aid in uncovering the mystery, a somewhat surprising twist after she’d, up until this point, been seemingly jockeying with Frida for Slater’s attention. Women are taught to compete with each other, when they ought to be supporting one another, Sarah explains at one point. It’s a line that, in a tense scene, is deployed in a way far less on the nose than it might seem on paper.
The lightness of its thematic touch for its first half is one of the film’s great assets (a boon felt all the more for a film whose original title was “Pussy Island”), as it focuses mostly on working, on a narrative and cinematic level, as a potent and engrossing horror-thriller. Still, within Sarah’s line rests the film’s nonjudgmental observance of a dynamic that is presumably real when women like Frida and Sarah orbit elite circles: the intoxicating allure of wealth and power and the learned reflexes to step over one another or look away at the right times according to the rules of the game.
It’s a perspective that Kravitz perhaps would be particularly suited to give insight into as someone who likely grew up ensconced among the rich and famous, although, of course, Kravitz was never someone who was on the outskirts trying to get in. But what she was plausibly accustomed to is the reality that women encounter in spaces partying among the powerful — the knowing looks they might give to one another, blinking at each other in certain situations.
The movie’s punchline is about what happens when you blink twice and don’t look away. That’s when the film becomes a work of revenge fantasy, where its tension is finally uncaged into something gleefully, violently absorbing, but also where the whole framework can feel a tad queasily contrived.
By the end, a part of the experience makes one wonder what sharper point Kravitz is trying to make beyond the obvious ones — and it’s clear she wants to say something — while another part simply wants to lean into the audacious experiment she’s crafted. One where the film’s tart bite is remarkably thrilling, even if there’s some hollowness to its center.
“Blink Twice” opens in theaters on Aug. 23.
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