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For a film like Blink Twice to achieve frightening commentaries on sexual assault, counterculture, class, and race, it takes a director who can transcend basic sociopolitics. In her feature debut, Zoe Kravitz is not that director.
Instead, her film (she co-wrote the screenplay with ET Feigenbaum) plays more like a concept than a fully realized idea. The same can be said of its protagonist, Frieda (Naomi Ackie), who aspires to live the lifestyle of infamous tech mogul Slater King, played by Kravitz’s partner Channing Tatum.
Frieda and her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat) work as waitresses at a gala, which allows the two women to change into eye-catching dresses and mingle with wealthy people. Frieda’s heel breaks, and it’s Slater who helps her up, which leads to a night of brooding that culminates in Slater being invited to his private island, where he lives in seclusion after publicly apologizing for his relatively unknown behavior in the film.
For the tech mogul’s entourage, Kravitz has assembled an impressive cast: Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke. These guys, with aperitifs in hand, are meant to inspire fear. But only Slater King’s therapist, Richie (Kyle MacLachlan), knows how to play pleasure into menace.
Kravitz creates an unsettling atmosphere. Day and night merge into an endless summer of perfume and partying, producing a double-edged rhythm that both unsettles and makes the viewer nervous. Photographer Adam Newport-Berra casts Aki’s face in shadow, foreshadowing the anxiety she’ll feel when friends begin to disappear, gaps appear in her memory, and an exoticized Native woman calls her by another name.
Tatum uses the same lighting, but he looks more haggard than you’d expect. In a relatively underdeveloped role, he surprisingly casts a darkness over a likable romantic image, creating a frightening effect. Women like Frieda and Sara (Adria Arjona) vie for Slater’s affections before finding unity in each other, a theme that feels a little half-baked in the script by Slater’s aloof sister, Stacey (Geena Davis).
Blink Twice is haunted by lost opportunities. As a woman and a survivor, Frida felt invisible. But Kravitz leaves a void where black women feel unexplored. She renders Frida similarly invisible, erasing any backstory about her with a twist. What does it say about Frida finding her self-worth in the wealth of white men? Ideas about boycott culture are equally half-baked, reaffirming the public’s short attention span and belief that apologies are acceptable. This collective forgetting is unevenly parallel to the memory loss that occurs in sexual assault cases.
After the film’s inevitable bloody cry for revenge, it advances the idea that integration into the same insidious capitalist system that made its characters its victims in the first place brought liberation to Frida. The film depicts black wealth as both freedom and personhood, a cocoon that protects them from persecution, and the best revenge. Like “Blink Twice,” this idea demands second thoughts. —The New York Times
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