By Sandra Hall
BLINK TWICE ★★★
(MA) 122 minutes
Never trust a tycoon with a private island. It’s a lesson often repeated in movies and television but Frida and her friend Jess haven’t got the message.
Frida – played by Naomi Ackie, best known for her role as Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody – feels ground down by her job as a cocktail waitress, so when one of her customers, Channing Tatum’s tech billionaire Slater King, invites her to holiday on his island, she accepts immediately. So does her flatmate Jess (Alia Shawkat), who’s just as eager for a break from humdrum routine.
Frida (Naomi Ackie, left) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) learn the hard way that you should never accept a free holiday from a tycoon in Blink Twice. Credit:
At first all goes well, with languorous days by the pool and candlelit dinners in the company of a gang of fellow fun-seekers. Then the party drugs come out, spiced up with a tropical variant involving snake venom, and the weirdness begins.
One night Jess vanishes and nobody but Frida remembers she was ever there. And Frida begins to experience memory lapses, coupled with nightmarish visions leading her to wonder if she’s losing her grip on reality. It doesn’t take her long to find out.
The film is actor Zoe Kravitz’s debut as a director. She started working on the story seven years ago with the idea she would create a garden of Eden, only to turn it into an outdoor prison a la Lord of the Flies. But you don’t have to scrutinise this too closely to find echoes of the Jeffrey Epstein case. King’s male playmates are his corporate colleagues and their hangers-on, and the female guests know as little about them as Frida and Jess.
What happens next slots the movie into the satirical horror genre made popular by Jordan Peele’s Get Out, except Peele made it look easier. Kravitz favours a saturated palette, extreme close-ups and an amplified soundtrack of bumps and crashes that gets louder as more drugs and booze are consumed. House rules dictate everybody is dressed in white, which means the players resemble a band of demented ghosts once the night-time revels get serious.
Channing Tatum’s tycoon Slater King is relentlessly polite in Blink Twice. Credit:
There are some familiar faces amid the mayhem. Christian Slater makes sinister work of the role of King’s chief lieutenant, Kyle MacLachlan appears briefly as his pompous therapist, and a ditzy Geena Davis turns up as King’s assistant-cum-housekeeper. There’s a lot of ditziness about, mainly because everybody is high on something, a state of mind that doesn’t do a lot for the standard of the dialogue. Conversation does happen.
Once the action really gets under way, most of it concentrates on the women’s desire to escape, even if they’re not quite sure what they’re escaping from.
Ackie is relentlessly photographed in harshly lit close-up, which means her wide-eyed performance develops a cartoonish quality. As her suspicions intensify, she teams up with Adria Arjona’s Sarah, who’s trying to summon the skills she learnt as a contestant on the TV series Survivor. Her diminished powers of concentration, however, can only take her so far.
Tatum, who is Kravitz’s fiance, makes energetic use of his looks and charm to make an unlikely villain out of King. His unfailing politeness is supposed to be one of the film’s best black jokes, but the script’s satirical intent soon gets lost amid the bloodletting, which is a pity because there are some mordant moments along the way.
The conclusion is clever but clunky in that it’s abrupt and contrived. It plays as if Kravitz came up with it when she first conceived the narrative and had to work backwards to make it fit. And it wasn’t easy.
Blink Twice is released in cinemas on August 22.
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