The actress to director pipeline presents valuable opportunities for women to tell the same stories that we have been getting but with renewed social currency. That’s how it goes with Zoë Kravitz’s debut feature, Blink Twice, which blends the concepts of Get Out (2017), Knives Out (2019), and The White Lotus (2021 – present) lifting these modular delivery mechanisms for social satire and imbuing them with a message that rings clear and true: Believe Women.
Blink Twice is about forgetting. And then it’s about remembering again. The story is that some women are lured to an island by some men who seem to have mysterious ulterior motives. They just want the women to focus on one thing: they’re having a great time.
Cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) swoons over tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), and is swept off her feet and relocated to an uncharted island alongside her best friend. It’s the stuff of fantasies until it becomes the stuff of nightmares. Frida’s friend goes missing and nobody else seems to even know she existed. Why?
Snappy and flashy, Zoë Kravitz gets right down to business. Her direction is energetic, lightweight, and moves quickly. Comedy is balanced well enough against suspense. Kravitz also co-wrote the script with E.T. Feigenbaum who also wrote an episode of the under-rated Zoë Kravitz-starring TV show High Fidelity (2020). They make a seamless team and have punched up a script where the audience reacts at all the right laugh lines. The suspense does not always prove the same measured response and the contrivances needed to motivate the story forward are messy in motivation and character detail, but it’s a pacy, fun movie with predictable and yet satisfying twists and turns.
In the wake of #MeToo, we have experienced a fresh wave of Women’s Revenge movies and this is another one of those — surely relatable and of tangible value to those who the movie is suited for. The actors are beautiful and the cast is notable, it’s really a heavyweight cast for a movie that would generally work with unknowns. That’s the privilege of working with Amazon-MGM and having a name like Kravitz to direct the thing.
Whether you’ll remember the movie is another thing. It’s fast and fleeting; events and characters come and go and the train keeps moving. There are enough laughs and deliberately designed thrills here to consider the movie successful as a comedy or a thriller. But what will you take away from it? A sharp and clever ending seems to have designed the movie behind it, and that’s a functional design, but you’re not going to remember it tomorrow.