Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice is an angry call to eat the rich

There is nothing subtle about the “eat the rich” message used in this book. Blink twicethe horror thriller that adds “director” to the list of hyphens for actor-producer-writer-model Zoë Kravitz (The Batman, Kimi). This is the kind of film where people speak in declaratory speeches, or let silent tears and waving knives do the talking for them. The statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blatant and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that seems to be the film’s absolute point.

Blink twice is a story designed to make people angry and then give them a focus for their anger. Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum want to elicit validation and righteous anger, and they rarely hold back. But they’re operating in a mode so familiar from other recent films that it’s hard for Kravitz and Feigenbaum to find their own distinctive ground.

Actor Naomi Ackie is their primary weapon in that particular war. Ackie gives a compelling, empathetic lead role as Frida, a catering company wage slave who’s torn between paying the rent and making a move on her unlikely crush, the super-rich tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum). Slater has recently been embroiled in something of a scandal, and he’s on a standard media-backed image-rehabilitation tour that includes public apologies, “I’m working on myself” vows, and some envy-inducing references to getting back to nature on his private island, where he grows his own crops and raises his own chickens.

He’s also partying hard with his inner circle. Frida catches Slater’s grateful gaze when she’s supposed to be working at his company’s glitzy annual gala, and soon they’re on a luxury private jet with her roommate and best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) bound for said private island. They’re joined by a handful of Slater’s own besties, mostly played by familiar faces — Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment as two of his work buddies; Kyle MacLachlan as his therapist; Geena Davis as his eager assistant. And then there are the other women on board, Hot Survivor Babes champion Sarah (Adria Arjona) and the giggling party girls Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen).

Once they arrive on the island, the champagne, weed, and designer drugs begin flowing, in between rounds of gourmet dining, daily pool parties, and hedonistic lounging. Except… while Frida tries to express interest in a relationship with Slater, and Sarah continues to competitively leer as if she wants him for herself, the nights somehow continue to blur together and sex never comes into the picture.

There’s more to it than that. Frida’s housekeeper is acting strangely. Venomous snakes keep showing up. Frida can’t figure out how she keeps getting lumpy dirt under her custom-made animal-design fingernails. Something is terribly wrong, Jess suggests, and they don’t know what. The answer is dark enough that Amazon MGM Studios issued an official trigger warning, because they didn’t want the audience to be surprised.

Approach Blink twice if a Big Twist movie only disappoints viewers: The Big Twist is fairly obvious, heavily telegraphed, and misses the point. The point is what women do in a situation where men seem to have all the status, power, and influence—and why so many men throughout history have wielded those things in such predictable ways.

It’s certainly no coincidence that most of Slater’s tech bro friends are white rich guys, while Frida and the other women are all lower class, women of color, or both. The power imbalance of class, gender, and race is visible throughout Blink twice in the bright reds and stark black and white that also characterize Slater King’s decorative aesthetic during that annual company gala.

And yet the film approaches none of these things with nuance or careful craftsmanship. There is certainly potential in the setup, but Kravitz and Feigenbaum are working in the shadow of many similar recent films, including The menu, Triangle of Sorrow, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Storyand the disastrously poorly executed Don’t worry darling. Like all those movies, Blink twice first revels in the privileged, glamorous lives of the super-rich, and then indulges in the fantasy of interrupting those lives with righteous violence. But in an age of ever-increasing wealth inequality, when roughly every third thriller villain is some form of tech bro, it takes more than a simple “dudes bad, wealth bad, power corrupts” message to make a film stand out.

Kravitz and Feigenbaum get far with striking imagery and style, and by tapping into relatable frustrations. Frida and Jess’s situation is certainly understandable: they just want to escape the worries of rent, their sleazy boss, and their dead-end jobs. The film’s entire engine is driven by anger at how easily those things fall into the hands of certain types of self-righteous, self-righteous, endlessly spoiled men, while women (particularly women of color) pay a heavy price to achieve the same goals. Tatum’s amused, warm charisma, set against Ackie’s convincing jumble of emotions about her situation, gives that anger a focus and a face.

But it doesn’t give much depth. In the last 10 minutes or so, Blink twice suddenly comes into focus, with a brief moment of clarity and creativity that is beyond any comparable film of the last few years. Suddenly it feels like the film has a more specific point of view, and a much sharper, more edgy edge. If that kind of intentionality and specificity were extended over a larger portion of the film, Blink twice would be a real talking point. As it stands, it’s just the latest film to tell a familiar story about men versus women, haves versus have-nots, and how cathartic it can be to imagine a bloody response to societal ills that rarely come within stab range.

Blink twice is now playing in theaters.