Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen massive shifts in social attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality as movements such as BLM, #metoo and believe women have penetrated every inch of social media, allowing people to tell their stories in order to try and establish a sense of understanding about the issues that plague them each and every day. The latest example of this is Blink Twice, the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz, that takes the all-too-real concept of women being manipulated and abused by privileged men and adds a brutal, satirical spin to it with surprisingly entertaining results.
Now before you recoil at the thought as something as shocking as rape being made light of thanks to cinema’s latest Catwoman, let’s not forget that Jordan Peele essentially did the same thing with his smash hit neo-slavery tale, Get Out, and such amoral debauchery has also recently seen a swell of popularity thanks to Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn. Add to this a blackly comic, yet brutal denouement and what we essentially have is I spit on your Saltburn.
Frida is a cocktail waitress who desperately yearns to be seen as finally have her place in the sun, but I suppose the next best thing is to buy expensive dresses with her roommate, Jess and crash the next splashy event they’re hired to work. However, said event is being held by recently shamed tech CEO, Slater King, who has stepped down for some questionable past behavior in a flurry of public apologies and after being humiliated by a broken high heel, Frida finds herself in the company of the hunky, yet gentlemanly, billionaire bad boy.
Amazingly, the undercover waitress and the dashing money bags hit it off, and they do so so well that Slater invites them back to his own personal island where he and a close circle of friends plan to crash out, drink loads, smoke weed and let off as much steam as they possibly can. Unable to believe this once in a lifetime opportunity to rub shoulders with the elite while shrouded in a virtual paradise, Frida and Jess can’t believe their luck and soon they’re living the high life, with no real need to return to the dreary lives they once knew.
However (and you knew that was coming), after a while, Frida finds that all the constant champagne and fat blunts is seemingly starting to effect how she’s viewing reality and time seems to eluded her altogether. Worse yet, one morning she wakes only to find that Jess has vanished and no one seems to remember her having been there at all and soon the cold, clammy fingers of paranoia have well and truly wrapped themselves around her. What is going on and more importantly why? What does the effect of venom from the local snakes have to do with anything and why does that elderly maid keep referring to her as Red Rabbit? Prepare to find out that to forget is far easier than you ever feared.
While it might sound hugely unimaginative on my part to simply declare Blink Twice as Get Out for victimized women, it also proves to be unavoidably apt as not only does it involve a head fucking conspiracy carried out by wealthy white guys to enslave the minds and bodies of the people they want to control for their own entitled ends, but it approaches the triggering subject matter with a biting wit that cuts far sharper than any blade. As it weaves its satirical gumbo from any number of distressing happenings ripped right from the headlines – be it the Harvey Weinstein case or even the guest list from Epstein’s Island – Kravitz (who also co-writes) is all fired up when it comes to skewering her targets thanks to a mind wiping set up that allows the rich and shameless to perform the most blatant and brazen acts of sustained date rape you could possibly imagine – but even though it’s her debut feature, the director knows that it still has to operate as a feature and not just a finger pointing enterprise and thanks to an impressive eye for detail and a killer sense of timing, Kravitz proves to be quite the artist to watch.
The movie plays the whole thing as a slowly unfurling, paranoia infused mystery that starts as The Glass Onion and eventually ends up as a vastly improved take on Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and while there’s some obviously hefty themes at play here, Kravitz balances them with care as so not to diffuse the rapidly mounting tension that she expertly lays out with patience. Adding to the “joke” of it all, she’s cast an amusingly strange array of male actors to portray the comrades of Channing Tatum’s charming King that contains the likes of Christian Slater, Simon Rex and Haley Joel Osment. The casting surprises also lean over into the female section of the cast with a befuddled Geena Davis as King’s personal assistant and Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat as Frida’s lighter obsessed best friend.
However, leading the pack is Naomi Ackie as Frida who has to shoulder the main burden of pulling off exactly how insidious this conspiracy really really chiefly by how fucking terrified she is the second she realises that something’s terribly amiss and she backed up by an equally impressive Adria Arjona who some managed to milk genuine fear and laughs equally when they have to band together and try to lock on a desperate poker face despite knowing the full horror that they’ve wandered into.
While Kravitz tackles numerous aspects about the many horrifying aspects of sexual assault (gaslighting, violence, objectification, the realisation that you’ve walked into a really bad situation), she does so with a sardonic smile on her face, leeching many creepy moments (notice how the flowing dresses double up as restraints) and blackly funny moments that spring mostly from the white knuckle tension, but when it’s time to cut loose, the movie shifts gears into a cathartic, misogyny-free, I Spit On Your Grave that sees some satisfyingly bloody retribution that feels more than earned once you discover what’s actually been happening.
In fact, the only thing holding Blink Twice from unfettered greatness are two minor points with the first being that Kravitz holds out a little too long until pulling the crazy trigger – although her ability to hold the unbearable tension for so long is nothing short of a gift. The other is – as I hinted at before – that the movie is just too similar to the aforementioned Don’t Worry Darling even though that film seemed way less urgent and definitely feels more tentative than Kravitz’s aggressive, in-your-face, confrontational style. If the previous movie suggests the need for an uncomfortable conversation on the way home, Don’t Blink out and out fucking demands it and is all the better for it.
Judging on the massively entertaining/harrowing results, both Zoë Kravitz and Naomie Ackie deserve to be much bigger stars and once the former has tucked away her Catwoman threads, I genuinely hope she gets to use her directorial voice again soon – preferably as loud as she can.
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