“Blink Twice” (2024) is Zoe Kravitz’s triumphant directorial debut. It opens with a hazy green image gradually revealed to be a lizard then transitions to fingernails with lizard painted on them. The hand belongs to Frida (Naomi Ackie), a waitress, and that hand is rapidly swiping her phone as she consumes social media about Slater King (Channing Tatum), a bad boy tech billionaire who retreated from the limelight after a (never revealed within the story) controversial incident and has returned as a changed man devoted to charity, alternative therapies and extended stays at his private Mexican island. Frida and her roommate/best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), decide to use their access as cater waiters to infiltrate his annual gala and don some primary-colored evening gowns and heels. Frida succeeds in capturing Slater’s eye, and the chemistry is undeniable. Slater invites Frida to his island with a group of friends, and life on that island is a sumptuous contrast to their dingy apartment. Frida and Jess joyously accept, but after days of leisure, Jess is ready to go, but Frida is not. When Jess disappears, Frida notices, but no one else remembers her. What is going on?
Whenever I watch a movie about something unusual happening, I ask myself if the reason is scientific/human, alien or supernatural. “Blink Twice” is the kind of movie that will reward eagle-eyed movie goers. Ackie is one of those British characters actors who is an unrecognizable chameleon and has the experience to carry an entire movie on her shoulders. Whether as the servant on the lowest rung of society in “Lady Macbeth” (2016) or the titular character in “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” (2022), she knows how to get the job done. She did not look like Houston, but she still nailed the role. As a protagonist, she is a relatable every woman, but also not because she is a Black, poor woman with flashy nails. In a world where anything culturally Black is called ghetto, but later is colonized and respected as art once appropriated, Frida is not the typical image of a woman who could snag an eligible bachelor like Slater King.
Kravitz’s introduction of Slater King, founder and former CEO of KingTech and founder of KingTech Foundation, captures and recreates the language of how media depicts moguls using the visual vocabulary reminiscent of Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches at Macworld Expos and Apple Worldwide Developers Conferences or thought leaders speaking at TED Talks. Kravitz took a big swing by casting her partner Tatum as Slater since he does not fit the physicality of the men who usually appear on those stages, but the Black wife effect is real, and Kravitz’s fiancé, Tatum, is officially on a roll after his widely praised appearance in “Deadpool and Wolverine” (2024). As someone who has never been a fan, it is nice to see that Tatum is an actor who can nail roles that do not require dancing or fighting. Though a stranger, the parasocial effect of these images makes Slater feel familiar to Frida and the viewers long before Frida meets him and not interrogate her fixation on him. When Frida first sees Slater, a circle window on the kitchen door feels like a reference to the iconic opening 007 credit sequences. Slater is soft-spoken, down to earth and affable. He generally says the perfect thing, especially whenever anyone expresses misgivings and hesitations at his offers. He presents as a sensitive, respectful man, who wants to enjoy his good fortune without letting it corrupt him; thus, casting a wide, democratic, multicultural net while creating a community. It would be interesting if everyone who watched the movie could take a poll to determine why we thought Frida was so focused on him: gold digger, media crush, Cinderella fantasy. It is simply accepted that of course Frida should set her sights on Slater.
Kravitz cleverly leverages our engrained societal expectations for women, lulls us into living the fantasy of the lifestyles of the rich and famous and invokes the nostalgia of childhood where the difficulties and dangers of adulthood are erased. Everyone’s basic needs are taken care of without the quid pro quo of relationships between financial unequals. No one thinks that Anna Nicole Smith married J. Howard Marshall II without her sexualized physical attributes playing a role, but the dynamic on the island is innocent, including Slater and Frida’s slow courtship which consists of long walks, lots of conversation and gazing into each other’s eyes. The guests do not even have to face the difficulty of choosing their outfit. All the women get the same two-piece bathing suit, not bikini, white long dress and straw hats. Men get white pants and flowing buttoned down white shirts. There is some sedate drug use, but activities mostly include lavish dinners, lounging in the sun and running at night. Kravitz is one of the rare first-time directors who has a deliberate sense of tempo in editing and varying the length of scenes to convey what life is like on this island. Without a remote control and taking notes, it becomes impossible to determine how long everyone has stayed on the island especially as the days become routine and less distinct. In one comical moment, a character asks, “Why are we running?” At first, the atmosphere seems like paradise, but the use of editing and color starts to instill an unsettling sense that something is wrong.
While the dynamic between Frida and Slater is the film’s foundation, “Blink Twice” is delightful because of the collective and individual power of its ensemble cast. Kyle MacLachlan as Rich Stein, Slater’s therapist, is the most disturbing character even though he has less than five minutes of screentime. Simon Rex, who gave a star performance as a down-and-out ex porn star in “Red Rocket” (2021), plays Cody, Slater’s childhood friend and the resident chef who has set his sights on Sarah (Adria Arjona—I still need to see “Hit Man”), a “Survivor”-esque reality star except on an even more exploitive show. Sarah behaves icy towards Frida and seems to be bringing her reality show skills to a competition for Slater’s affections. Christian Slater is Vic Mahoney, Slater’s CFO who is a missing a pinky. Haley Joel Osment as Tom acts as if he is the ugly duckling in the group and restricts himself to eating hard-boiled eggs to shed pounds thus abstaining from the multiple course dinners. Geena Davis plays the purple-clad Stacy, Slater’s assistant who attends to the logistics of island life. Less recognizable actors perform as gun toting security guard Stan (Cris Costa), Lucas (Levon Hawke), the youngest man in the group, Heather (Trew Mullen), the big blunt queen and Camilla (Liz Caribel), an app inventor who seems to be one of the few women who fits in with Slater’s business. Maria Elena Olivares’ character is mysterious, only speaks Spanish and is the only servant who tries to communicate with any of the guests, specifically Frida. She is also the only woman servant, and the servants appear to be indigenous to the island, but mostly just smile and execute their tasks wordlessly. Yellow vipers are also indigenous to the island, but Slater views them as pests so the servants devote a lot of time to executing them.
“Blink Twice” will make you want to watch it twice, especially as soon as the mystery is resolved. It will probably be 2024’s “The Menu” (2022) seasoned with dashes of “Midsommar” (2019) and “Get Out” (2017). It is so colorful and lush that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but after the first viewing, you will want to watch it at home armed with a remote control to rewind and pause the blink and miss it moments that offer clues regarding the island’s activities. Even after the mystery is solved, the denouement packs a punch as the ticking time bomb of accountability counts down.
After you see it, come back and read further because this movie will launch a thousand think pieces.
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Time to unpack “Blink Twice.” Everything that Slater says has double meaning once you solve the mystery, which happens in a terrific scene between Frida and Sarah when they finally set aside their silent rivalry and question Slater’s hospitality. All the women are strangers, and all the men know each other. Each person who uses the perfume on the island are erasing their memory and do not remember that every night, most of the men are gang raping and torturing them. My only problem with this premise is that the physical signs are very superficial, but most people, even AI Robots, who are sexually violated usually have very horrific physical injuries. Basically, Slater’s theory is that if you do not remember the trauma, then the trauma will not affect you, but he does not care about his victims’ trauma. He wants to live in a world where he can do anything that he wants without repercussions and pretend that his victims like it, which evokes the Zora Neale Hurston quote, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” He is the nightmarish Ken demanding attention on the beach. Slater needs women’s attention and time. Rape is only part of his fun.
It is not an accident that the women guests are mostly people of color, thus people who have historically been viewed as lacking ownership of their body thus once legally unrapable as property. Beauty has always been a curse for enslaved women, but here it is chilling in the way that Slater has the women participate as willing participants in their enslavement. At her day job, Frida is admonished for not being invisible, and her willingness to demand attention, including in messy, embarrassing, flawed ways makes Frida a rebel, but also puts her in danger.
Slater’s memory theory is flawed. The body keeps score, and the mind remembers. Frida does remember, but she does not have the context to understand the images. The opening scenes can be retroactively reinterpreted from attraction to a fixation and a subconscious desire to have revenge. The Polaroid photos reveal that Frida was on the island last year, and she got a scar on her head when she hit it on a rock during an assault, and the last thing that she saw was a lizard. It is also interesting that the men miss physical details that the women notice but cannot solve such as dirt under their fingernails. It is a delusional, childish fiction to believe that there will not be some sort of accountability.
Frida primarily identifies as an artist, anailmals, and an aspiring entrepreneur, but to the men in “Blink Twice,” though treated like an equal who belongs with them, they see her at best as a servant and at worst a slave. The signs are there from the subtle, not alarming, ways such as Slater falling asleep on her during the plane ride. At night, he treats her like an object flipping her over and offering her to guests to sexually devour once reassured that she will not remember. She is not even exclusively Slater’s to enjoy but shared among at least Vic and Rich. These brief images evoke images of antebellum slavery and mass rape. It is almost more disturbing that Kravitz never depicts Frida being violated because it ensures that Frida’s humanity is never diluted. It is impossible not to see her as a frightened human being in pain and trapped, especially as she and Sarah stall and pretend to not know anything by suppressing their revulsion and disgust with strained smiles and masks of desire. It felt as if Kravitz decided to expand on Georgina’s story in “Get Out.” Slater, as the most physically dominant member of the group, treats her like a bag of flour, which reframes his daytime solicitous conversations as a mockery. Cody appears to have exclusive ownership of Sarah, who is the only character whose rape is shown on screen. It is unclear what horror the others, including Camilla, endures. Camilla’s devaluation is also shocking because she is a peer.
The antidote to this island flower turned into perfume induced amnesia is also organic-the venom from the snake, which the Bad Ass Maid gives Frida. Yellow becomes associated with memory, which is why Jess is associated with a yellow lighter and is wrapped in a yellow towel as she begins to have an awakening, but Slater kills her once he realizes that she remembers. Kravitz manages to evoke an intersectional women solidarity without oversimplifying the equation to women are good and men are bad. Like the Bad Ass Maid, Frida is a servant, but the two are also more than their day job. Despite language and societal barriers, Frida views her as someone to socialize with. The antidote is not just the venom, but the ability to see someone as a person beyond their function. Frida administers the antidote to Sarah then they collaborate and surreptitiously give it to all the women so they could have more numbers on their side to fight back against the men. Not everyone appreciates this intervention. Stacy flies in a rage, and I do not think that it is an accident that an older woman begrudgingly accepts and defends to a system that hurts her. Feminists from the Eighties often had to adopt their male counterparts’ toxic practices to survive in male dominated industries so when younger women come on board seeking refuge and understanding from these women, they often perpetuate the abuse as a kind of hazing ritual—if I had to deal with it so do you, instead of changing it.
During the rape orgy flashback, a man, perhaps Slater, appears to be chasing Lucas, who sports a black eye. Did the men also rape Lucas? The imagery implies it, but Slater’s denouement speech makes it seem as if Lucas is one of those men who knows that something bad is happening but does nothing about it because it does not affect him, and he is unwilling to jeopardize his place in the hierarchy. Kravitz misses an opportunity to depict still existing, acceptable sexual misconduct against boys and young men who may appear feminine either because of their age or sexual orientation. Misogyny does not just stop with women but flows through toxic masculinity to discipline any male who has feminine characteristics. Also, in a world without women, they become targets of unwanted sexual attention. Based on Slater’s allusion to childhood trauma and not remembering anything before ten years old, it is possible that he suffered a similar fate and is just replicating a subconscious trauma.
It is an ugly concept, but people are nothing but holes to abusive, privileged, entitled men with no moral center. These exploitive men know better because they also know how to do their version of code switching to appear safe and lure potential victims into trusting them. They want to violate bodies at night but enjoy their camaraderie during the day. Kravitz is skewering the idea of cancel culture and apology tours as insubstantial and ineffective, which is also a subject meditated upon in the documentary, “Sorry/Not Sorry” (2023). Once an abuser, always an abuser, and Slater’s rage at suppressing his true nature is evident in the denouement scene. Even with all his power and sadistic indulgence, he resents what little civility he fakes to survive.
“Blink Twice” advocates a more definitive solution and not giving second chances to bad actors. The denouement is a cathartic delight as the women go on a murderous rampage, which in real life would not necessarily happen. People cannot control how they will react to danger: flight, fight, freeze or fawn. Every woman fights. Other than Slater and the bodyguard, who is not an active participant in the reveries but enforces it, most of the men are scared of people who are half their size and are easily stopped with a little resistance, which explains why they needed a thumb on the scale to indulge in their rape fantasies. Only Slater survives, and Frida turns the tables by giving him a taste of his own medicine so she can be his puppet master and get outward recognition for defeating him by establishing the façade as his wife and as a form of restitution, control of his empire. Also by forcing him to eat red meat, she forces him to reflect the reality of who he is, not the poseur healthy living, spiritual dude. I’m sure that it is unlikely that Kravitz watches South African horror movies, but the resolution reminded me of “Good Madam” (2021). So Frida does achieve what she set out to do at the beginning of the movie, even if she did not consciously understand her plan. I wish that we saw how Sarah fits in the picture.
Kravitz also punctures the self-help industry with armchair psychologists who are really enablers of the sociopathic haves. Bear in mind, I actually enjoyed and have used principles from Phil Stutz’s book, “The Tools,” but after Sarah Brady revealed texts from Jonah Hill, a peak example of weaponized therapy speak, who made a documentary about Stutz, which I still need to see, I associated that situation with Slater and Rich, who instead of seeing his patient as needing intervention as a danger to others, was just as seduced with the excesses of this fame, wealth and respect and is a willing participant to nonconsensual human experimentation. Such perversions of mental health are not new, especially when extrapolated onto the world stage or political world. Slater is a one-man colonizer who buys an island and uses its inhabitants as his employees, and the island becomes his laboratory with Rich as a consensual rat in his maze. Through science and his cult of personality, Slater creates a reality distortion field (RDF), which Kravitz conveys, and moviegoers will not be entirely immune to resisting.
RDF is a term used to describe Jobs’ charisma and effect on people despite also being widely known as a horrible person. While Slater’s Island may not be associated with a cult, Slater uses the same techniques: an initial nonthreatening interaction, love-bombing. Offering acceptance, community and success, isolating people, deciding what they dress and ingest, administering drugs, physical torture, secrecy and disrupting their sleep cycle. Controlling information and environment are important techniques to destroying someone’s identity.
Kravitz’s use of color is gorgeous. While in the real world, red, white and black plus contemporary minimalism dominates Slater’s world. At the gala, Frida wears red, thus fitting the color scheme while simultaneously standing out, and Jess wears blue, which stands out in that context. Slater pulls a reverse Cinderella by snapping off Frida’s heel, which also implies an implicit violence. Stacy is the only woman on the island who wears color, purple, which is a combo of two primary colors, red and blue, and pink, which reflects her ambiguous, double identity as dangerous and victim. Red is a color signaling blood (nosebleeds) and danger that disrupts the tranquil and trustworthy blue color, thus indicating that even if she is not consciously aware, Frida has an agenda and is dressed like a femme fatale. Red and white gates guard the entrance of Slater’s property. The bathrooms, other women’s nail polish and facial masks are blue, which symbolize relaxation, but in this case, are a deceptive distraction. The nail polish is an important note because just like enslaved Black women used their hair braid patterns as maps, Frida subconsciously uses her nail polish like a diary to remember. White is the color of innocence or cluelessness, but also sacrifice, ceremonial and blankness. At night, the women writhe around and hiss like witches out of Shakespeare’s “MacBeth.” The sauna scene evoked “Midsommar.” Before the reveal, the nighttime activities feel akin to the reveries from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The color of the island and venom is lush and green, which combines yellow, awareness, and blue, which symbolizes trust. Sarah wears a green robe signaling that she is on Frida’s side. The blue and white chess board, which Heather dominates against Vic, plays an important role in the denouement as a dance between death and leisure. The blue hats indicate how the deception is attacking and putting their minds’ guard down. There is a long running joke of a red chair in Slater’s home not fitting the overall décor, and he only finds the right spot when the jig is up thus danger to him finally takes root.
“Blink Twice” had some minor but forgivable flaws. Sometimes Kravitz spent too much time on concepts like the monotony of their oblivious drugged life or the caper hijinks of Frida trying to get the phone and Sarah distracting everyone else. Without more graphic detail, I wish that I had more of a sense of Vic and Tom’s demented nature. Slater and Cody’s modus operandi is very distinctive and not individuating the others on that level felt unfinished.
While Kravitz’s first film is a banger without the philosophical musings, it works on multiple levels besides gender norms. It is about power, race, the veneer of polite society and professionalism hiding violence, imperialism, nature versus toxic science and the constant demented desire to enslave and the impossibility of doing so completely despite having every advantage. It is a great film, and I would like to watch “Don’t Worry Darling” (2022) to see if they share themes. Bear in mind, I only saw “Blink Twice” once so I may have left a lot of significant imagery out. The movie offers some practical lessons such as do not go to another location, especially if you do not have a way to get out, like an island. Not having a way to communicate with the outside world, surrendering cell phones and not checking if there is reception, further isolates and is a danger sign.
