Actress Zoe Kravitz has carved out a compelling niche for herself by playing proud, but prickly characters in projects such as THE BATMAN and BIG LITTLE LIES. She’s one of my favorite actresses working today, so when I heard that she had written a thriller and was directing it too, I got excited. Her sly, low-key intensity helped turn HBO’s paranoid thriller KIMI into one of the best of the genre in recent years. And I imagined that her film BLINK TWICE would probably follow suit. Instead, the movie is quite the opposite; a noisy and in-your-face affair that’s far too heavy-handed in mining the dark comedy out of the material. The film is everything that Kravitz is not as a performer: broad and loud.
It starts promisingly with a young woman named Frida (Naomi Ackie) suffering from some odd flashbacks that seem to be of fraught memories. Additionally, she seems fixated on watching tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) apologize on television for certain sins that precipitated his fall from societal grace. But now he’s back from his time in the wilderness, and ready to show off his company once more. It just so happens that Frida and her BFF Jess (Alia Shawkat) are going to be waitressing at King’s new company event, and they can’t wait to rub shoulders with the VIPs.
Kravitz creates a party scene that is laden with abrupt edits, noisy sound effects, and dissonant musical chords. Is she overplaying her hand about the doom that awaits these two waitresses as they agree to follow King to his private island for a week’s vacation or is she just showing off as a director? No matter, all the self-consciousness starts to get in the way of a seemingly sly script she’s written with E.T. Feigenbaum. There are hints that there could be trouble in paradise, but Kravitz’s direction underlines it all too heavily before they even board the plane.
Things only get choppier and noisier once King whisks away our heroines, along with a slew of other drunken party guests, to his island getaway. Before you can say “Jeffrey Epstein,” all of the guests start indulging in naughty behavior from drugs to drunkenness to chasing around. Everyone is living large, noisy, and extroverted, but the characterizations feel thin. Each male guest, other than the soft-spoken and mysterious King, seems to have a single trait. Vic (Christian Slater) is intrusive with his probing questions and Polaroid camera. Cody (Simon Rex) is an overzealous foodie. Tom (Haley Joel Osment) is little more than an overweight and bitter actor.
The women guests are even more one-dimensional. They’re little more than party girls lost in the excesses of the week’s activities. Adria Arjona, so sharp in HIT MAN on Netflix this summer, tries to add something behind the angry eyes of her shallowly-written character, but it never feels fully realized. Only Ackie and Shawkat get the opportunity to create truly three-dimensional female characters in the film.
Kravitz does better when the story leans into the menace and mystery that start creeping into the festivities. A plethora of snakes slither in, not to mention a couple of sinister caretakers. Surprising wounds start showing up on the female guests’ bodies in the AM. And Frida’s mind starts playing tricks on her. One minute she can’t remember what she did the night before, the next she’s experiencing vivid feelings of deja vu.
The film starts working better once Frida starts to put two and two together, with a couple of surprising and satisfactory rug pulls. Still, Kravitz tends to underline every new twist and act of violence so they almost play as comedy. Yes, the material is supposed to be darkly humorous, but it shouldn’t come off as silly, which it too frequently does. The noisy soundtrack, over-the-top violence, and mugging performances don’t help either.
It’s a shame because when she reigns in the excesses, Kravitz shows real promise as a director and writer. Her acting career seems to have been guided by the motto “less is more,” but it seems such sound advice didn’t come with the new hats she’s wearing here.
