Blink Twice

dir: Zoë Kravitz

2024

It’s not enough that her parents are Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz who are, if nothing else, two of the most supernaturally attractive people on the planet. It’s not enough that her parents are incredibly talented and successful as well in their respective fields. It’s not enough that Ms Kravitz is immensely talented and successful herself, and that she’s been great in most of the performances I’ve ever seen her give, in films as different as The Batman and, a film I actually liked, being Kimi or that remake series of High Fidelity.

Now she wants to successfully direct movies as well. Goddamn talented nepo babies: a leg up and a foot through the door, and so much more.

Also, as if to emphasise what a nepo baby experience this all is, a child of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman is in this, but no, it’s not Maya – it’s their son Levon, who plays a complete nothing of a character. He is there just to remind us what the untalented nepo babies are up to.

Plus, Ms Kravitz also hires her fiancé, who’s clearly hurting for work, being Channing Tatum, to play one of the main roles here: that of a tech billionaire who’s always vaping.

If only that was the worst of his crimes. This is one of those movies where someone accidentally or unintentionally gets trapped in a place where they might get hunted or murdered or worse. You know, like those films where rich people hunt poor people for their selfish amusement.

The twist in the tail here is that the rich tech bros led by Slater King, which is a name so terrible it could only be the name of a vile tech bro who rubs shoulders with the likes of Elmo Husk or Peter Thiel, have it all figured out. He and his other monsters are monstrous predators, but they are comfortable ones.

The thing is, right from the start, we know something odd is going on, and that’s a good place to start from.

Frida (Naomi Ackie) is a cocktail waitress for catered events, and the special event here is serving the rich fucks at some penitential event. Unrepentant tech douche-bro billionaire Slater King has done something wrong, and gives a token non-apology apology and says he’s going to withdraw from the running of the company where those abuses presumably occurred, but all will be well when he reappears at some time in the future when people have forgotten about what he did. For the time being he’s going to retreat with similar douche-bros to his own private island paradise and meditate on what he did wrong.

Wouldn’t you know it, he sees Frida and is enraptured (when she and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) shed their black and whites and put on cocktail dresses), and invites them back to ‘his’.

‘His’ happens to be some Caribbean island, I think (even though this was shot on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico), where the pool water is cool and clean, there are multiple servants to attend to your every need, and the champagne and drugs are always free flowing.

There’s even clean clothes for you to wear all the time. And even if you get a stain on your clothing, it will miraculously be cleaned or replaced or something without you even noticing.

Sure, of course, on holidays like this there will be gaps in your memory. Blackouts. It happens. And if your best friend goes missing, and other people don’t even remember that she was there, or that she even existed, that’s not really anything to worry about.

Just keep eating, drinking and smoking, and ignore all the signs that something is terribly wrong, and all the evidence that maybe this isn’t even your first visit to the island.

This flick works, on a certain level, and that’s great, but it requires you to not think, even for a second, about what’s going on. Because if you do think about it, it makes no sense, and it also undercuts the broader and far more important message about just how disposable women are seen as being in contemporary society.

You also have to not think about how, in reality, in actual reality, women individually and in groups are treated appallingly, by men with money, and men with no money, and society shrugs its shoulders and grunts “it is what it is.” Also, forget that we live in a world where a woman can be sexually assaulted in Parliament, and where the rapist sues the victim for defamation, and where the rapist is given cash payouts for cocaine, and has his accommodation comped for a year by a tv channel in order to get exclusive interview rights. The world we live in has men acting like Slater King and his cohorts get away with their sadism for decades, and the victims get to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to have the threat of bankruptcy loom over them to work in concert with their trauma for the rest of their lives. And most of these fuckheads never pay for their crimes, ever, with the full scale of the truth coming out after they’re dead, whether they’re Jimmy Saville or Mohamed Al-Fayed or Epstein or Weinstein or Trump (hopefully soon for those last two) or the whole fucking lot of them whose abuses are known well before the revelations are made public.

So what I’m saying is, this flick is unrealistic: we currently live in a world already where none of these women would be believed, or taken seriously, or would be able to get a conviction no matter what the evidence. So the “solution”, seeing as it is something of a science fiction-y one, is for a problem they don’t actually have, being having to face the consequences of their actions.

And yet the flick insists this is the way it would go, with douche-bros of this type. It’s not hard to see this as something of a primal scream against the very injustice that I’m talking about.

Alas, for my money, having the magical compound that they use against the women (to make it so they can’t access the memories of their repeated abuse) is a bridge of a certain distance, but then having the even more magical solution / antidote available be the venom of the snakes plaguing the island, well, that element crosses that bridge too far into being a bit naff, a bit too convenient.

For most of the flick I was tossing up whether it was horror, whether it was a straight thriller, or something else. I’m still not sure. For a lot of living people, this could be unfortunately something of a documentary. We are but the play things of the gods, so when the likes of P Diddy or the R Kellys or the Tates or the Ghislaine Maxwells of this world decide whether we live or die, well yes, it’s horrific. The last section is somewhat satisfying revenge horror, because these fuckers really deserve horrible things to happen to every part of them.

But even then Ms Kravitz doesn’t completely go down the route that we thought this was going to go, and crafts a “living well is the best revenge” kind of resolution that I kind of admired and kind of resented, too. It’s almost saying something like “sure, you were horribly abused, and your friend got murdered, but you go get that bag, why don’t you?”

There’s a certain chutzpah that I admire about how they choose to end things. It’s kind of galling, too, because I think of all the people who never had the option that she somehow magically pursues at the end of the flick thanks to the memory potion, which I’m going to stop going on about right about now.

Most of the flick doesn’t stand out in terms of performances, other than Frida as the lead and the great Adria Arjona as someone who seems like she’s a rival, but who end up saving each other. Haley Joel Osment is here, and like everything he’s ever done since playing the kid in Forrest Gump and The Sixth Sense, is creepy from beginning to end, and Christian Slater, an actor with a long history of domestic abuse allegations also literalises that link by playing a middle-aged sexual abuser here as well. All jolly good in their death throes, but there’s only one bit of bonkers acting that stands out.

Towards the end there’s a scene where Slater, mask off, admits there’s no way to apologise for the things he’s done and intends to keep on doing. And then he makes us feel, deep in our bones, just how sociopathic the character is, by repeating his meaningless apology from the beginning, and then repeating “I’m sorry” in an increasingly unhinged manner, in a way that would scare the neighbours on adjacent islands.

Fucking hell, Tatum, I had no idea you had it in you. That’s the most acting I’ve seen him do in like twenty years.

This is far pulpier and far less cerebral than it pretends to be, but it’s still a depressing yet interesting flick.

7 times #not all men, but #always these men out of 10

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“They know, dude. They know everything. We're gonna go to Hell for this.” – my dude, in the real world you wouldn’t even get a ticket for it – Blink Twice