A Horror Movie About Befriending the Rich and Powerful

The last place any fictional character should want to be these days is a private getaway owned by an eccentric billionaire. The Glass Onion turned out to be a haven for no one. The culinary offerings of The Menu poisoned the restaurant’s guests. Any place presided over by and built for the ultra-wealthy—the secluded home of a genius in Ex Machina, the gory trappings of Infinity Pool—has never been safe, for anybody.

Blink Twice, the actor Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, follows this trend. The film deposits its heroine, Frida (played by Naomi Ackie), a cocktail waitress, into an island retreat belonging to the tech mogul Slater King (a coolly menacing Channing Tatum), who has become a bit of a recluse after a reputation-tarnishing scandal. The trip is idyllic at first, as it always is, until the poolside parties morph into a more sinister reality. Yet Blink Twice is not about eating the rich or satirizing the one percent. It’s instead a stylish, if tonally uneven, exploration of how being in the orbit of powerful people can produce an insidious sense of powerlessness that easily curdles into self-deception.

Frida, after all, is aware of how unusual it is for Slater to invite her and her friend and co-worker Jess (Alia Shawkat) to his tropical hideout after Frida flirts with him at a gala. They’re nowhere near his social or financial strata; they were catering the event, until they slipped out of their uniforms to snag free food and drinks. But in her astonishment at their good fortune, Frida insists that they look past the oddness. Any sign of potential trouble, such as having to hand over their phones or wear all-white ensembles selected by Slater, is, she tells Jess, “just, like, rich.”

Besides, there are other dynamics to worry about: Slater’s friends have invited several other women on the trip, including an alluring reality-TV star played by Hit Man’s Adria Arjona, all of whom also vie for Slater’s attention. Everyone is dazzled by Slater and his lifestyle; everyone wants to remain worthy of being on his island. In circumstances like these, the film makes clear, when wealth lulls and silence is encouraged, an outsider like Frida will feel the need to bury her instincts—to insist that she’s having fun, even as she becomes more of a prop than a participant in the revelry.

Kravitz has an eye for constructing unsettling images that evoke Frida’s conflicted feelings. The film frequently alternates between trippy, comic montages of the group’s debauchery and jarring tableaus that hint at a darker undercurrent to their fun. The sound design is especially intrusive—every click of a lighter, drip of a faucet, and pop of a cork tears through the din and dialogue at unexpected intervals, as if insisting that its characters wake up. Blink Twice captures how easily someone’s mind can grow numb to danger amid booze and bland conversations with strangers. Frida, before long, needs help figuring out what day it is. When Jess disappears, others don’t even remember her being there. It doesn’t help that Slater is undeniably charming, enough to make his self-indulgent koans (“Forgetting is a gift”) and patronizing check-ins (“Are you having a good time?”) sound harmless.

Blink Twice falters when the emotional terror of Frida’s situation gives way to perfunctory horror-movie thrills. The film suggests that Frida’s unease comes from a cocktail of terrible societal truths: Her gender and occupation make her an easy target, Slater’s wealth and crew of yes-men protect him from taking full accountability for his flaws, and women have long been, in a twisted form of self-defense, conditioned to rationalize threatening behavior. But though Kravitz stages some impressively bloody sequences in the movie’s final acts, the violence feels rushed. The script, by Kravitz and E. T. Feigenbaum, becomes overstuffed with one too many subplots involving thinly drawn characters played by actors worthy of much meatier parts, including Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan, and Geena Davis. As a result, those earlier, more trenchant observations about Frida’s plight are underbaked by the story’s end.

The film was originally titled Pussy Island, a much more provocative name that Kravitz said in an interview she had chosen because she wanted to “reclaim” the profane term. I wish she had stuck with it, even if the movie would have been a much tougher sell. Its vulgarity underlines a precise fury—the kind of anger that comes from having to wear too many taut smiles in too many boozy rooms for too many powerful men—that Kravitz, as a so-called “nepo baby” born to the upper echelons of Hollywood, seems to understand well. Blink Twice feels like a cathartic exercise, a sharp and exciting debut with a strong emotional point of view. If only it didn’t flinch.