Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, begins as a Cinderella story. Frida (Naomi Ackie) is waitressing at a glitzy private event when a footwear malfunction sends her tumbling into the burly arms of charismatic tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). Kneeling at her feet like a perfect Prince Charming, he snaps off the heel of her one unbroken shoe to provide her with a matching pair. A few hours, several flirtatious smiles, and a great many drinks later, Slater asks Frida to join him and his friends on his private island.
Blink Twice, which was originally titled Pussy Island, feels like the latest attempt to rebottle the lightning of Jordan’s Get Out. From Antebellum to The Menu, They Cloned Tyrone to Don’t Worry Darling, lots of movies have tried to replicate its formula—exploring inequality through high-concept thrillers with plots that hinge on a major twist. None have reached the dizzy heights of Peele’s feature debut and Kravitz doesn’t either, but her “exotic getaway gone wrong” tale does provide the cinematic equivalent of a passable vacation read.
The world that Frida and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) arrive into is one of absolute splendor. On King’s remote island there are no phones, no outsiders, and nothing to do but eat, drink, and be merry. The other guests seem like the sort of people you’d expect to glom on to a man like King, ranging from failing sitcom actors and reality TV stars like Tom (Haley Joel Osment) and Sarah (Adria Arjona) to King’s foodie friend Cody (Simon Rex) and his tech protégé Lucas (Levon Hawke). And then there’s Christian Slater’s Polaroid camera-toting, pinkie finger-missing Vic, who’s basically that one oddly abrasive dude that all guy groups seem to have.
Of course, it turns out that the scandal-entangled King’s island, which has no line of contact to the outside world, isn’t the paradise it seems on the surface. Frida and Jess begin to lose track of time as one day of drunken debauchery rolls into the next, and the sense that something is wrong becomes harder to ignore until, finally, the island’s sinister secrets are exposed.
Kravitz’s film isn’t nearly as tightly constructed a bit of storytelling as the likes of Get Out. It somehow manages to show its hand too early while also playing its cards too close to its chest. The result is that we spend a large chunk of the film marooned in a kind of nowhere zone between the initial mystery and the shocking reveal. The suspense and the intrigue quickly bleed away as we wait for Frida to catch up with us so that we can fill in the last few blanks.
There’s a similar clumsiness to Blink Twice’s use of humor. Some of the riffing between Frida and Jess (and, later, between Frida and Sarah) is quite amusing as they make self-aware comments about the weirdness of their current situation. But the script continues to pepper in the cute one-liners in the third act, at which point the story has gotten so severely dark—the film begins with a warning about the potentially triggering subjects it will depict and a link to online resources to help those effected—that these attempts to lighten it are seriously jarring.
Blink Twice clearly has thoughts about the danger that men can pose and the way women are forced to perform happiness while in the company of such predators, but it never provides more than a surface-level understanding of such dynamics. You hold out hope that the film will dig deeper, and by the time you realize that it won’t, you’re arrived at the obligatory unleashing of Girl Boss vengeance that, as a result, offers neither satisfying catharsis nor meaningful satire.
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