Jason Bailey
Instagram reel-scrolling is truly our modern equivalent of channel-surfing, so it makes sense that Zoë Kravitz begins her feature directorial debut Blink Twice with her heroine, Frida (Naomi Ackie), doing just that—and settling on an interview with Slater King (Channing Tatum), a tech titan in the midst of a public rehabilitation tour. He stepped down as CEO of King Tech, and started a philanthropic foundation, “after everything that happened,” and it speaks to the winking insider-whisper nature of Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum’s screenplay that a) he won’t say what happened, and b) we don’t have to be told what happened. “I’m just trying to do better,” he tells the reporter, with something resembling sincerity. “I don’t know how else to say sorry.”
Frida met Slater King a year before, at the company’s annual gala; she’s a server at a fancy event venue, and the time has again come for her to work the King Tech Gala. “Don’t forget to smile,” her boss reminds her, and she does, and they reconnect nimbly. At the evening’s end, he invites Frida and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) to his private island, where endless days of sun, food, drink and drugs await. At first, it seems too good to be true; later, that is revealed to be quite the understatement.
Kravitz, it is my pleasure to report, is not making some casual vanity project; she’s an honest-to-god filmmaker, formally inventive and with a firm command of tone. The dark undercurrents of the festivities start brewing almost immediately, and Kravitz has a real gift for finding ominous visuals and shock edits, and a way of shooting close-ups that make the most common sights and sounds seem vaguely threatening. The picture is also a marvel of aural encompassing—every creak, whisper, and rumble is played for maximum effect (the sound designer is Jon Flores), and she finds the perfect needle-drops to match the shifting moods, from the recurring James Brown themes to the virtuoso bad vibes of the “Ain’t Nobody” dance sequence. (Kravitz and Feigenbaum previously worked together on the Hulu adaptation of High Fidelity, which speaks to the picture’s pop music bonafides.)
And while the broad strokes of the story she’s telling are fairly predictable, she adds welcome wrinkles and unexpected detours. Early on, the script introduces a rival to Frida for Slater’s affections—Sarah, a reality TV refugee and thus something of a cliché, who seems constructed to obstruct and thwart our protagonist’s aims and muddle her slowly-dawning realizations. But in a refreshing swerve to expectations, she’s right behind Frida, putting things together right alongside her, and transforming a wheezy competitive relationship into a team-up. It helps that the role is filled by Adria Arjona, proving herself a real-deal movie star after the conflagration that was Hit Man; she adds her own texture and nuance, and her comic timing is razor-sharp.
Channing is similarly well-used. Kravitz wrote her fiancee a role that unsurprisingly plays to his strengths: warmth, charisma, a slight aloofness. He sells the intensity of their initial attraction, as well as the good-guy affectations he casually deploys in her company (“Therapy changed me life,” he says, solemnly). But ice-cold blank slate of his face when his true nature comes out is chilling, as is the memorable scene of him saying “I’m sorry” over and over, workshopping the volume and emphasis, trying to make it sound convincing, and realizing he’s fundamentally incapable.
Some of the supporting characters are more sketches than people, though Geena Davis is enjoyably manic, and Christian Slater is well cast as an enabling sycophant (that air of menace he always carries is especially handy). The satire is a touch heavy-handed at times, and the payoff is not exactly subtle, but fuggit, these are not subtle times; sure, it follows Glass Onion as another story of a Zucker/Musk/sociopathic-techbro-dickhead-of-your-choice on a private island story, but the vague psychobabble and crypto talk have the authenticity of overhead bullshit (even if the quips of the climax are a bit too cute for the dark territory we’ve landed in).
Kravitz’s sense of pace is also laudable; she doesn’t waste a second getting this thing on its feet, and in the punchy middle stretch, she cleverly uses the cinematic language of montage to create a necessary narrative bluriness (“I never know what day it is” first seems like a confession of bliss, and soon sounds like an indictment). Perhaps most importantly, she plays fair with the big twists, sprinkling little crumbs from scene one so nothing feels like cheating. Once it all becomes clear, it’s jaw-dropping. And then we’re waiting for the bloodbath, which she cheerfully, skillfully delivers.
B
“Blink Twice” is in theaters this weekend.
