Fed up with their boss and having to work at another billionaire’s gala event as hostesses, best friends Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) decide to crash the event.  Moments before security is going to throw them out, Slater King (Channing Tatum), CEO of the King Corporation who is hosting the event, asks the girls to stay.  As they talk through the night, Slated invites them to his private island for a vacation.  They accept, but as the lazy island days begin to blur together, Frida and Jess begin to suspect there is something sinister at play on the island. 

Zoë Kravitz directs Blink Twice from a script she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum.  MGM opened the 102-minute thriller on over 3,000 screens ahead of its eventual streaming debut.  This is both Kravitz’s and Feigenbaum’s feature writing and directorial debuts, and the pair deliver a taught mystery that squeezes the absolute most out of its largely single location and small cast.  Realized on screen by production designer Roberto Bonelli’s careful eye and the overwhelming allure of the Hacienda Temozon Sur that was able to take the Yucatan jungle and give it a beautiful and intoxicating island flare despite the actual estate being quite a distance from the coast. 

Ackie leads the film as Frida and has the difficult task of presenting a street-smart character who has totally let her guard down while not losing the audience that always approaches the events of thriller and horror movies with a more discerning eye than the characters that inhabit those stories.  Kravitz allows Frida some room to move here because of an infatuation with Slater and an overwhelming sense of millennial apathy having been worked to the bone with nothing to show for it.  This all helps us understand why she would have joined a total stranger on an island getaway with all of his rich and powerful friends who she does not know, but Kravitz is not content to let that narrative convenience be the total driving factor of her lead’s performance.  In turn, Ackie is up to the challenge and peppers her performance with these hairline cracks until the absurdity of her situation becomes so wild that it cannot be written off any longer.  The paranoia of the narrative seeps into Frida and then spills out from the screen washing over the audience. 

We get wrapped in the dread not only because of the twists and turns of the narrative but also because of how it is presented.  Adam Newport-Berra does not set up their shots in the traditional way we expect for horror and then editor Kathryn J. Schubert assembles the film in such a way that as soon as we are settling in, there is a moment of whiplash as the film jumps forward in a jolting montage and we, along with Frida, have to account for the lost time.  Often these jumps bring us to the dawn of a new day, but there is no reference to time – and cellphones were relinquished by the guests when they arrived at the island – so we are never quite sure when we are, but one thing that we are certain of is that we do not always trust our surroundings.  Kravitz is, to borrow a word that is thankfully absent from her text, gaslighting us through these visual cues.  It starts small, like when the “Kool-Aid stain on the cult robes” has been lifted clean after Frida awakes one morning.  As she goes to the outdoor dining room, we catch a whiff of Deja Vu.  The meals change.  The conversations change.  We are not simply repeating the day before ad nauseam, but we are beginning to feel like we are being guided down a path and are losing our agency.  But at the same time, we are also beginning to doubt our own recollection of events as the days pass like xerox copies, each one similar to the last but the finer details fading over time. 

That is, until, Jess disappears right around the second act, but when Frida awakes, no one else on the island seems to realize or even remember who Jess is despite her name in Sharpie on the lighter they all share.  The night before, Jess is bitten by a native snake and we later learn that the snake venom neutralizes a numbing poison, Desideria, that is synthesized from the oils of a bright red flower that grows only on the island.  The effects of Desideria cause short-term memory loss so the girls, who all wear perfume laced with the poison, are in a constant fugue state where they never remember the events from the night prior.  The night that Jess got bit, we see fragments of that memory resulting in Slater running a knife across the girl’s throat, killing her. 

This is the first and most overt example of violence in Blink Twice and acts a bit as a release valve for us in the audience. From the beginning, even without trying, we are always a few steps ahead of Frida as she puzzles over a mystery she does not even yet realize is a mystery; though much of this is due to a title card warning of sexual violence so we already know in broad strokes what is in store for these women.  The film tries to throw us off the trail by weaving in all of this cult-influenced imagery from flowing white robes to moonlit dances, but Kraviz and Feigenbaum are too bold in their daring the audience to make the leap that what they are seeing will lead to sexual assault.  When it is revealed that the men spend their nights raping the women, the violence we see on screen is shocking, but the narrative reveal is anything but.  It is a shame because the film builds great tension and atmosphere but then feels like it shies away when it comes time to indite. The film does, however, not spare Lucas (Levon Hawke) who wonders why he is being harmed even though he did not do anything – or, to use his own words he “didn’t do anything” which has a much more pointed connotation – or Stacy (Geena Davis), Slater’s assistant and accomplice of sorts because she believes that “forgetting is a gift.”

The real let down though comes in the final twist that undercuts everything a modern audience comes to the film armed with and everything that the film seems to be trying to tell us about the prevalence of sexual assault.  Bookending the film is another gala event, but this time it is not Slater King who is recognized as the CEO of his surely unethical tech company but his wife, Frida.  Within a year of the horrific events of the film, she has married her abuser – and the murderer who killed her best friend – and it must be assumed that she has not pressed charges since he is still sitting next to her, albeit dazed by the Desideria in his vape.  Maybe it is a girl boss moment? But it just feels like ick. 

Blink Twice stumbles on the page, but it is still a handsomely made thriller that is very enjoyable in the moment. A little too insisting which allows audiences to either get ahead of the characters or grow bored with their party antics, neither is so much that it causes us to lose attention and break the tension.  The mystery may not be strong enough to support multiple viewings, but for that all-important first watch, it is well-acted and well-crafted; everything that is put to the screen is absolutely magnetic.  A strong freshman effort, Blink Twice is nothing to scoff at and not to be missed. An unfortunate fumbling of the message in the same way the sacrifice at the end of Promising Young Woman (2019) practically derails and disarms their entire argument, with any luck, Kravitz, like Emerald Fennell, will still be given the means to bring about her stylish visions and bold stories.