Tech Bros Are The Villains, In Blink Twice

Blink Twice: Very Demure, Very Mindful Of Its Genre Influences

This is #CineFile, where our critic Rahul Desai goes beyond the obvious takes, to dissect movies and shows that are in the news.

BLINK TWICE revolves around a weekend of debauchery and a chilling experiment on a billionaire’s private island. A modest cocktail waitress, Frida (Naomi Ackie), accepts the invite of dashing tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum); they’re part of a group that involves Slater’s wealthy male friends, business partners and attractive female guests. Naturally, her dream weekend slowly morphs into a nightmare. It’s all saucy fun and games until it’s not. Frida inevitably notices — as any starry-eyed woman who confronts a famous man’s advances does — some sinister undercurrents: her best friend disappears, reality and drug-induced hallucinations collide, and her memory becomes unreliable.

Actress Zoë Kravitz reportedly started writing her directorial debut, initially titled ‘Pussy Island,’ back in 2017. The title aside, a lot has changed in the last seven years. For starters, Eat The Rich is no longer a novel theme. You can tell that Kravitz might have been freshly inspired by Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), a first mover that reframed the psychosocial satire as an inventive genre vehicle. Then came the more mainstream and class-rage renditions like The White Lotus, The Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness and The Menu. In that sense, Blink Twice is a few years too late: the setting and suspense are painfully familiar. Even the island looks dated. The peripheral characters behave the same; even the strange casting — popular faces like Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis and Kyle MacLachlan play bit roles — achieves the same cognitive dissonance. In the seven years since its inception, Blink Twice has essentially lost half its significance.

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At first, the ethnicity of Frida and a primary character, Sarah (Adria Arjona), hints at another race-focused American satire. But Kravitz, to her credit, reveals a gory take on gender politics instead. The men in the gang know something that the women don’t. Snake venom and shadowy locals and indigenous flowers play a key role. The commentary about trauma erasure isn’t madly original, but the treatment suggests that race and skin colour and class and religion are irrelevant to the dynamics of sexual abuse and male predators. It’s never not topical, of course, but the build-up to the revelation — the memory flashes, slick editing, creepy music and camera angles (those tight close-ups and deadpan track-ins of the women’s faces are so Shyamalan-themed) — is too long and derivative. You know the twist is coming, so the film just seems to bide its time and toy with its atmospherics. At one point, it nearly becomes a female buddy comedy — particularly when Frida and Sarah join forces and try to figure out the truth. It’s a neat touch, because here are two victims who are hoping to understand each other despite being shamed into silence.

The gist of the narrative is obviously the stories — laced with denial, self-doubt, confusion and guilt — that women are conditioned to tell themselves in a male-dominated world. The clues are there. Slater King is a ‘cancelled’ billionaire who has issued a public apology for past behaviour. He asks to be forgiven but he’d much rather be forgotten. The weekend on the island explores the controversial line between the two, where unwitting admirers like Frida (whose name informs the surrealism of her situation) speak to an age in which living is a constant act of remembering and editing. The design is telling: Powerful men like Slater want to be remembered for who they are and not what they do. They are so poisonous that nothing less than the actual venom of a snake becomes an antidote. Yet, the film itself unfolds with the conviction of a person who thinks they’re setting a trend that’s actually run its course.

Naomi Ackie gives a very methodical horror performance. It’s like she knows that her face is being artfully framed and shot in specific ways — the kind that signifies that she is in a romantic and terrorised trance. I’m not a fan of movies that flaunt their psychological physicality, and Kravitz’s first-film syndrome is all too visible in these portions. You can tell that the director in her is striving to impress rather than express. You can hear the multiple influences, the delayed voice and her rampant cinephilia. It’s almost as if she starts a staring contest with the modern viewer — and blinks first.

Playing in theatres.

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