‘Blink Twice’ Review
What if ‘Get Out,’ but for #MeToo?
BLINK TWICE FEELS DISTINCTLY LIKE the product of an era that’s just passed.
It’s like someone decided to make a movie after first seeing Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele’s masterpiece of horror about an African-American man trapped by a white family seeking to steal his body, then absorbing the various #MeToo scandals that followed the 2017 Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then finding themselves outraged by the revelations about Epstein Island that came to light following that predator’s arrest in 2019. It’s a horror movie about repressed trauma, like Hereditary (2018)! There’s even a brunch joke tossed in toward the end for good measure.
Sadly, co-writer/director Zoë Kravitz’s film is less than the sum of its influences. Not because Blink Twice feels slightly out of date, precisely, but because there isn’t enough work done at the screenplay level to make us care about the people who find themselves on the island owned by Slater King (Channing Tatum). King is a tech-bro billionaire who found himself exiled for some unnamed misdeed—all we see is the aftermath, an Instagram apology followed by headlines asking where he’s gotten off to—and is trying to make up for it by throwing philanthropic money at the problem.
Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) are caterers barely scraping by when, at King’s biggest annual fundraiser, Frida refuses her boss’s call to stay invisible, finds herself charming King and his entourage, and the pair are whisked away with three other women to King’s humble island abode. Kravitz’s working title for the film was Pussy Island, so you can imagine what the tech bro and his buddies are getting into there.
Once on the island, the women who have been brought there can’t really remember what they’ve been up to each night. Is it just the pharmaceutical-grade drugs they’re on? Is there something in the food? What shenanigans are afoot? Why is there dirt under Frida’s nails? Why does no one remember Jess when she suddenly disappears? Would anyone really remember if any of the other women who came with them disappeared? Or the men?
And that’s the big problem with Blink Twice. It’s not that the ideas are warmed-over replays of everything we were discussing in 2017, when the script for Pussy Island was first conceived by Kravitz. The issue is that the vast majority of these characters are barely characters, we hardly know them. Of the three other young women brought to the island, only one has a real personality: Sarah (Adria Arjona), who seems to have been a champion on a Survivor-like show known for putting hot women in bikinis (her description, not mine) that has fallen out of favor in our enlightened age. There are two other women who could’ve easily disappeared without anyone in the audience knowing they were gone.
The men aren’t sketched out in much more depth, though the faces of the actors are at least more recognizable: Haley Joel Osment plays a washed-up sitcom star forced to eat nothing but eggs on this tropical paradise to slim down; Christian Slater plays a scummy lawyer or fixer or some such; Simon Rex plays an amateur chef whose defining characteristic is calling Sarah “babe”; Kyle MacLachlan shows up as a therapist for a scene.
Just one small example of how the movie fails its characters: At one point in the film, Frida mentions to Jess something “Mom” would say, which made me sit up and think “Wait, are they sisters? Or just roommates/coworkers? What, really, is their relationship?” It’s hard to imagine these people existing beyond the film’s screen. We just don’t really know anything about these characters or what they want or what they fear or what they think of the world. The middle 30 minutes that could have been spent giving us a reason to care about them is instead spent ensconcing us in their drug-addled world, helping us understand how they lose track of the day and date. Which is fine, but it’s hard to care what happens to anyone when nearly everyone is either interchangeably victimized or interchangeably guilty, and it’s hard to empathize with their confusion when they got on an airplane with a bunch of strangers and went to the drug island in international waters owned by a guy who seems to have gotten MeTooed where they did mind-altering substances all day. You don’t know what day it is? I’m shocked.
I will say that I enjoyed the visual sensibility of this movie. The early fundraiser is set in an almost Kubrickian whiteness, suggesting the false sterility of such events. The daytime action on the island is appropriately sun-drenched and washed out yet the colors still pop when they need to. And the evening sequences are lit largely by harshly flickering torches, creating a sense of menace even when everyone’s being nice. When the women run around in the dark, the whole thing feels eerily moonlit; the action in these sequences is dim and dusky, but not invisible, which sometimes feels like a lost art these days. Kravitz and director of photography Adam Newport-Berra deserve a hand for how Blink Twice looks, for sure.
I just wish a little more care had been taken with the story being told. Lacking the clockwork plotting of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, we’re left with nothing but ham-handed metaphors and social signifiers. And that’s not enough.