Blink Twice review: Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut falls apart on closer inspection

What’s festering beneath the ultra-luxe surface of Blink Twice’s billionaire retreat? It’s never explicitly named “Pussy Island” in the film, though it was the project’s working title. This is the feature debut of actor Zoë Kravitz, and she’s here to make a statement: about forgiveness and revenge, memory and accountability, and, most importantly, the patriarchy. She also wants to thrill and to empower, and has the shrewdly deployed Beyoncé track to prove it. That’s also where the film’s problem lies.

Blink Twice has a fixed destination in mind. It wants you to leave with the thought, “good for her” – that maxim that’s now become a shortcut for a certain kind of victorious female protagonist. But the context feels off here, and the film’s twists, as uncompromising as they are, don’t answer to what it actually means for women to face up to men’s abuse, triumphing hollower gains instead of the hard work of healing and finding peace. For a film that’s so explicit in how it tackles trauma, it makes for a frustrating experience.

Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) have wrangled their way into the inner circle of tech bro Slater King (Channing Tatum), slipping out of their wait staff uniforms and into heels they can barely walk in. She slips and falls. He arrives, like a knight, with his hand outstretched. She knows exactly who he is. She’s seen the apology video, the calculated “leave of absence”, and the charity donations that point to some unspecified accusations of sexual misconduct.

But materialism is a siren’s call and, soon enough, Frida and Jess have landed on Slater’s island, where the champagne is infinite, always topped with a raspberry, and drugs are consumed not in a sloppy, ravenous way, but “with intention”. Slater’s friends and colleagues – Vic (Christian Slater), Cody (Simon Rex), and Tom (Haley Joel Osment) – compete for the attention of the women, including former reality show contestant Sarah (Adria Arjona). They, in turn, are seeking the attention of Slater. It’s all one, big bacchanalian reverie, right up to the point Jess tells Frida, “Can’t you feel it? There’s something wrong with this place.”

Ackie’s performance is both slippery and earnest, so that we can both wonder at her initial interests in Slater (when she finds another woman’s lip gloss in her room, her response is “better luck next time, b****”), while not feeling like she’s blindly looking past the red flags.

And, stylistically, at least, Kravitz makes the film’s switch in tone convincing. She’s the kind of tuned-in actor-turned-director who’s clearly paid attention while on the sets of previous collaborators, among them Steven Soderbergh and George Miller (for 2022’s Kimi and 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, respectively), and reworked those influences into something she can call her own. The unease is palpable, from the way plates of food are slammed down in front of guests, to the perfect Instagram saturation of Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography.

But her script, co-written with ET Feigenbaum, leaves a lot untouched. María Elena Olivares’s character, credited only as “Badass Maid”, isn’t given a name or much humanity, and Slater’s difficulty remembering past childhood trauma is never successfully woven into the larger picture of abuse and accountability.

Tatum (who is Kravitz’s romantic partner) weaponises his Hollywood “nice guy” image as part of a gut-wrench subversion, akin to how Emerald Fennell cast comedic sweethearts Bo Burnham and Max Greenfield as abusers in 2020’s Promising Young Woman. He does a good job with Slater’s deviousness, right up to the point the film forgets that bad dudes have a tendency to really think they’re just misunderstood. Blink Twice struggles when it chases a satisfying story over more inconvenient truths.

Dir: Zoë Kravitz. Starring: Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis, Alia Shawkat. 15, 103 mins.

‘Blink Twice’ is in cinemas from 23 August