Blink Twice

Zoë Kravitz’s debut feature oversimplifies the nature of the abuse of power.

Naomi Ackie in Blink Twice. Image courtesy of MGM Studios.

Blink Twice opens with an online apology tour: a heartfelt, first-person video taken by a handsome man speaking directly into his camera phone; a series of “where did he go?” headlines scrolling swiftly past each other in a newsfeed; an article about an extravagant donation from a humanitarian foundation; a richly produced TV interview announcing the culprit’s readiness to reclaim his place in society. All of this is shown during a single bathroom break as Frida (Naomi Ackie) scrolls idly on her phone, a neat shorthand for the swiftness with which society casts out and then reclaims wrongdoers, at least when they’re fabulously wealthy. The fabulously wealthy wrongdoer here, a tech entrepreneur named Slater King (Channing Tatum), draws attention to the repetitive cycle of his apology tour by quipping, “I’ve said I’m sorry so many times it doesn’t even sound like a real word.” 

The problem with an apology that isn’t heartfelt is that it isn’t an apology at all, no matter how frequently it is repeated. It’s just lip service, acknowledging that something is wrong without resolving to fix the issue. Blink Twice knows enough about bad behavior to acknowledge that it exists, but it has a dim idea of the way bad behavior is enabled in the first place and an even dimmer idea of how to fix it. The movie doesn’t understand how power works. Blink Twice pays lip service to a problem without striking at the root of the issue.

Frida is a caterer with dreams of building her own nail-art business. Slater is wrapping up his apology tour with a grand dinner: effectively his coronation back into society’s good graces. When the two meet at the dinner, they share a connection. He immediately introduces her to his inner circle: his assistant (Geena Davis), his therapist (Kyle MacLachlan), and his crowd of rich hangers-on. By the end of the party, Slater has invited Frida (and her roommate Jess, played by Alia Shawkat) to join him and his entourage on his private island for a spur-of-the-moment getaway.

It’s apparent that something is wrong from the moment the group arrives on the island. Phones are confiscated. A Polaroid camera surfaces for memory-making purposes, though it surfaces at inopportune moments. The groundskeepers keep killing snakes on the property. Everyone wears white. Slater emphasizes that he’s now a proponent of clean living, pointing out the chickens raised on his property and serving rich farm-to-table dinners before turning around and offering mind-altering drugs for dessert. Every evening is a bacchanal, albeit a fairly chaste one: the group dancing on the lawn, everyone telling everyone else that they love each other, the women running across the yard in flowing white dresses. No one seems to be able to remember what day it is, nor do they care. They’ve all taken a modern-day trip to the land of the Lotus Eaters, complete with ever-present crimson flowers in nearly every frame.

The film spends a significant amount of time signaling that all is not as it seems, all while defusing the tension by calling attention to the fact that there’s a problem no one is talking about. Early on, Frida makes much of her good memory, but the film has trouble separating its perspective from hers as an increasingly unreliable narrator. Nor does it seem able to trust its audience to pick up on details, instead repeating clues that unlock the mystery in literal screaming red.

By the time the reveal rolls around, it’s almost a relief, though it is handled with a similar lack of subtlety. The movie’s true nature feels like an elaborate conspiracy that unravels in the telling, the kind of cover-up that fills paranoid message boards. It draws attention to its own convoluted nature just by the fact that it exists. Though the story is designed to map directly onto the real-world experience of being a woman in an exploitative situation, the gap between real-life issues and the movie that represents them feels insurmountable. The world of Blink Twice is so broad, its plot so boiled down, its point so obvious, that it neatly slots into the ranks of other genre exercises where the metaphor is the entire point.

The metaphor falls apart because Blink Twice ultimately doesn’t understand the nature of power. The story feels toothless, an excuse for bad behavior rather than an explanation of what enables it. The movie tries to play the “burn it all down” card but succeeds only in reinforcing the power structures it purports to topple. I kept thinking about the ending of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which acknowledges there is something warped about women’s place in society and which goes to great lengths to grasp at a “happy ending” that only preserves an ugly imbalance between genders. Neither movie has the creativity to imagine something truly new. Any poetic reversal of fortunes instead end up condemning their characters to live in the trap in which they’ve always been stuck.

★☆☆☆

Blink Twice is in theaters now.