DON'T BLINK TWICE,
IT'S NOT ALL RIGHT

Amazon MGM has chosen to release Blink Twice, the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz, with a trigger warning. "Blink Twice is a psychological thriller about the abuse of power," the solemn title card reads. "While this is a fictionalized movie, it contains mature themes and depictions of violence—including sexual violence."

The inclusion of this warning is largely being attributed to a backlash against the recent film It Ends With Us, which some viewers apparently went into unprepared for its depictions of domestic violence. Still, the decision here is a curious one. The MPAA has already—and appropriately—given Blink Twice an R-rating, for “strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references.” (For that matter, It Ends With Us was rated PG-13 for "domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language." There are issues, God knows, with the American film-rating system, but it would be to hard to argue either of these films was irresponsibly mislabeled by the Classification and Ratings Administration.) 

I am relatively agnostic about trigger warnings in general, but surely they are of limited utility for viewers who have already purchased their tickets and popcorn and planted their butts in their seats. Personally, I'd rather see a push for more prominent classifications—and perhaps more candor in trailer-cutting—so that people might actually know what they're getting into before buying their tickets. (And—as a side-note—if we can outlaw trailers that carefully conceal the fact that a movie is a musical, that would be great too.)

The trigger warning here is an interesting choice, too, because it actually constitutes a spoiler—in fact, the spoiler—for the film itself. Blink Twice is about a group of young women who accept an invitation to party on a billionaire's private island. Seduced by wealth and privilege, lulled by beauty and leisure, and plied with alcohol and drugs, the women only slowly come to horrified awareness that something far more sinister is happening to them. The preliminary caution, then, serves to prevent the viewer from being so seduced and lulled: we know, as the women do not, that there is rape and violence ahead, and so we are never even momentarily tempted by the apparent charms and glamours of the island. In effect, it is a strange and potentially self-sabotaging distancing device, breaking our sympathetic connection to the characters before we can even form it, and undermining any interrogation of our own attraction to wealth and luxury. (Kravitz's original title for the film—Pussy Island—would have had a similar effect, so I'm inclined to read this as every bit as much a creative choice as a studio mandate.)

Finally, I find myself reading the trigger warning rather cynically, as less of a helpful caution about subject matter, and more of a desperate claim to artistic significance. "Blink Twice is a psychological thriller about the abuse of power," the warning insists, because it is absolutely essential that we believe that going in. Without such assurances up front—without being urged to read it through this socially relevant lens—we might be tempted to recognize it as the stylish but recklessly shallow provocation it really is.

Naomi Ackie (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody) is Frida, a working-class cocktail waitress who shares a crappy apartment with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), and has what seems to be an unhealthy obsession with tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). King has been on a public apology tour for some manner of transgression that is never revealed—which is only the first of many key plot points the film completely neglects to explore—but that doesn't stop Frida and Jess from accepting an invitation to his private island after they crash his fundraising gala. Soon, the two are drinking champagne on a jet to paradise with the rest of his entourage, including three other attractive young women (Adria Arjona, Liz Caribel, and Trew Mullen) and an assortment of douchy dude-bros (Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, and Levon Hawke).

At first, life on the island seems idyllic: lounging around the pool by day, eating gourmet meals by night, and drinking cocktails around the clock. "For the first time in my life I'm here, and I'm not invisible," Frida tells her friend, and the "here" in that sentence, though undefined, speaks to the Instagram aspirations Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum want to explore: Frida means "here" among the beautiful people, here among the famous and wealthy, here living the good life that most people in the 21st century can only long for voyeuristically through their online windows. (It is telling that the young women barely protest when asked to surrender their cellphones: they no longer need to scroll social media, because they've stepped suddenly through the looking glass into the glamorous, enviable world it promises.)

But the days on the island start to blend together in indistinguishable montages, and the nights—given over to the taking of a special hallucinogenic drug—start to vanish from the women's memories in blackout fugue states punctuated with almost subliminal nightmarish flashes. They wake up with dirt under their fingernails, bruises they don't remember getting, and sometimes in different clothes than they remember wearing. Time loses all meaning—are the girls there for days? weeks? months?—and Slater's repeated question of "Are you having a good time?" starts to take on an increasingly ominous tone.

In terms of plot synopsis, it is probably not necessary to venture further into spoiler territory than that trigger warning provides—"abuse of power" and "sexual assault" are the key phrases to note—for the reader to imagine where Blink Twice is going from here.

A man (Channing Tatum) and a woman (Naomi Ackie), both dressed in white, sit around a dinner table at night drinking wine.

Make no mistake, there are things in Blink Twice that are commendable. First, Zoë Kravitz can definitely direct: as a first feature, this is a debut that is not merely competent, but confident and compelling. Her framing is lovely, and largely free of the typical mistakes and attempted flourishes of a first-time director: she trusts her camera, and trusts her cast. And her ability to work the mounting tension of a scene—and of the film, through some increasingly tricky emotional stakes—is remarkable. As an actress, Kravitz has a cool strength—a self-assured stillness of presence—that commands attention, and she brings those same qualities to her filmmaking here. It is exciting to imagine what she might still do with a better script.

And Ackie is certainly a star who deserves far better. Handed a criminally underwritten character, in a preposterous situation, with an absolutely unplayable arc to navigate, Ackie very nearly salvages the film. Blink Twice will inevitably draw comparisons—I would suggest it deliberately cultivates and craves comparisons—with Jordan Peele's Get Out. I do not think it comes close to earning those associations to an infinitely superior film, except in this one regard: as Frida becomes first subliminally, then more consciously aware of her situation, her character seems almost to live in that extraordinary moment when Get Out's Betty Gabriel smiles through the tears of her own barely-repressed trauma. We do not believe the situation—and we feel even less faith in the film's intentions with it—but we somehow believe Ackie's performance.

Tatum, on the other hand, is grossly miscast in a disastrously misconceived role. We can appreciate his willingness to subvert his own image, but he was the wrong actor to embody a nerdy toxic billionaire, and he is not a good enough actor to do anything interesting with it. He tries, to be sure: Tatum plays Slater King as someone almost unaware of his own power and privilege, nervous and tentative, slightly socially awkward. But Tatum is too handsome, too buff, too easy and chill: he can only play the people men like Zuckerberg and Musk think they are, the people they want to be, not the people they actually are.

A man (Channing Tatum) in a white linen shirt stares aside at the viewer through black reflective sunglasses.

A larger problem is that Kravitz and Feigenbaum have precious little to say about such men, and the power they wield, and the dangerously toxic culture they create around them. In part because the film relegates the majority of their crimes to hallucinatory montages—and enables their committal through such ridiculous and convenient plot devices that this might as well be a science-fiction film—Blink Twice depicts their abuse without ever really exploring it, let alone unpacking the mindset that enables it. (When a sort of conversation about it finally comes—fatally late in the film—it is rushed and simplistic and shallow, and couched in absurdly exculpatory terms that seem to locate abuse not in wealth or masculinity, but in childhood trauma and the cruel hand of the supposed "cancel culture.")

Nor does Blink Twice seem to understand—or even like—its women any better. Frida's "invisible" line—and one scene of her scrolling social media sitting on the toilet in her shitty apartment—is the entire extent of the hints we get to her motivation. It is insufficient to even explain her fascination with Slater, let alone her actions after she meets him. If Kravitz and Feigenbaum have woefully little insight into the billionaire class, they seem to have even less understanding of the working class: at no point do Frida and Jess seem believably poor, instead adjusting to the mindless good life as if they were born to it. (While they lounge in this tropical paradise, do they have no thoughts or concerns about their jobs? Their rent? Their families? Their pasts or futures? Is there not a single conversation about the struggles they endured that makes this life so attractive?) In a film that should be largely about class, the subject is pathetically non-existent. (As, for that matter, is the related subject of race: Frida is the only Black person in a sea of White privilege, but the topic is literally never acknowledged, let alone explored.)

Worst of all, the more I think about Blink Twice, the more I think it ultimately ends up blaming the women for volunteering so eagerly to be exploited. We could argue whether this accusation is inadvertent or deliberate, but the film's unwillingness or inability to explore the inner life of these women makes them seem vapid, desperate, and almost irretrievably stupid. ("What's crazy is that we got on a plane with a bunch of dudes we didn't know," Frida and Sarah [Arjona] eventually realize. "What the fuck were we thinking?" But this revelation comes so absurdly late in the film that no amount of alcohol or drugs or lifestyle envy can explain its delay.) In refusing to give us actual, developed characters with whom we might relate—by treating its women just as the men do, as beautiful and interchangeable objects—Blink Twice leaves us at best able to feel sorry for them, and at worst tempted to judge them.

(Men are "going to do what they're going to do," says Slater's assistant Stacy, played by Geena Davis. Stacy—an older woman who once was like these girls, perhaps, but now serves and excuses the patriarchal system that abuses them—is a bitterly complicated character. She might have opened more promising avenues of conversation, even thematically metaphoric ones about Hollywood's treatment of aging actresses versus ingenues. Alas, the film has no time or desire to explore her, so Stacy just comes across as another cruel, judgmental voice telling the younger women, Well, what did you expect?)

I am always loathe to attempt to analyze any filmmaker—review the art, not the artist is generally a good principle—but Kravitz's position in the industry makes some associations, at least, hard to avoid. I do not doubt her sincere desire to explore abuses of power, but—Hollywood royalty herself—she is perhaps not a person well-suited to examine the inherent traps and dangers of wealth and privilege. It is easy to imagine that Kravitz has attended any number of Hollywood parties in her life, and witnessed the exploitation of any number of beautiful, eager, clout-seeking young women by rich and powerful men. But it is difficult to imagine, based on this film, that she truly understood much about those women, or gained more than a distant, superficial grasp of the systemic dynamics at play in their abuse.

However it came about, we are forced to recognize—by the time its rushed, rape-heavy, slasher-violence-filled third act and offensively pat denouement come around—that Blink Twice tells us nothing we didn't already know. And that's a problem. If filmmakers are going to traffic in such sensitive and "triggering" ideas and images as Kravitz tackles here, I believe they have a responsibility to find something to say that makes the payoff worth the pain. Blink Twice—ultimately dumb exploitation masked as elevated horror, lifestyle porn guised as class satire, and misogynistic morality tale couched in phony feminist trappings—doesn't come close to earning its ugly excesses.

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