Blink Twice

Release Date: August 23, 2024

Director: Zoë Kravitz | MPAA Rating: R | LeavittLens Rating: 7/10

"Are you having a good time?"

So goes the repeated refrain in Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut Blink Twice, uttered from the lips of her now fiancé and central star of the film, Channing Tatum. With each repetition his words leak forth from the screen into the eyes and mind of the audience, as if his asking is not only directed at lead Naomi Ackie, but at us as well - are we having a good time?

During much of the film, it's nearly impossible not to answer "Yes." While grinning and laughing and knowingly nodding in response to its black comedic script (written by Kravitz alongside E.T. Feigenbaum), cinematographic sweetness, and iterative--if not derivative--filmmaking, we're thrust into a world that feels remarkably similar our own. And yet the movie's final third remains a bit wanting, and its provocative conclusion may leave some, by the end, saying "No."

The film opens on a blurred close-up of a tropical gecko, and after a slow zoom out, we quickly cut to the lizard-brain toilet scrolling of Frida (Ackie), with a montage all too familiar to our 2024 lives: flashes of dopamine hits ranging from silly and adorable animals to tragic accidents to makeup tutorials, all giving way to a clip of a public apology from tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum), whose ambiguous abuse in leadership has led him to make a canned public apology and retreat to obscurity. He was fueled by an emphasis on therapy which has allowed him to "see things differently," and such claims seem to be backed up by his behavior: he's exceedingly charitable; he has traded life in the spotlight for life on a remote island; even his speech, knowing eyes, and charming smile seem enough to win over anyone. Beyond displaying a perfect encapsulation of the jarring emotional experience of living online in 2024--being thrust back and forth between silliness, materialism, and moral outrage--it's clear Kravitz also wants to expose something else through King: namely, how easy it is to curry (or restore) public favor with the right social currency. In a culture where TikTok therapists and self-help gurus pour through our feeds alongside massive public displays of charity and do-goodery, it is often a cultural assumption that self-awareness makes us mature and outward moral acts make us moral. Such assumptions become all the easier to buy into when the person practicing their public piety is as good-looking as Slater King.

Indeed, King's good looks have Frida falling, albeit from a distance: she and her roommate Jess (in an awesome turn from Alia Shawkat, she of Arrested Development fame) work as low-level servers, and are tasked with pouring wine and delivering food for King's extravagant gala, which of course helps fund his charity work - because all that expensive wine and food is for a good cause. The allure of his charm and wealth ultimately captures Frida, who smuggles in dresses for herself and Jess as a way to play-act the life of the rich and significant during the gala. After an embarrassing meet-cute with King, they are both introduced to his important friends and, ultimately, given an invitation of a lifetime: to join King and co. on a trip to his infamous private island, where he has traveled in recent months to get away from it all and recenter his heart and mind in peace. The Epstein and Weinstein echoes are all over, and the film does manage to fall prey to the classic "horror/thriller characters are stupid" cliche here, but not so much so that we aren't interested in coming along ourselves.

So bursting with excitement, the girls join, and this is where Kravitz's indebtedness to film history and her genuinely insightful directorial eye come together. With overt references to classics like The Most Dangerous Game, modern social-commentary-thrillers like Get Out and Parasite, and even more comedic (and in vogue) eat-the-rich fare of recent films like Glass Onion and Triangle of Sadness, Kravitz has no shortage of style in the company she keeps and the films that have influenced her, and while all these Lucille Bluth-level visual winks make Blink Twice feel remarkably familiar (if not copied), they also reveal someone very much in command of a compelling and original vision. The ensemble performances she gets here are terrific and her understanding of how to create genuine thrills is evident in every detail of her eery Eden. She is helped along the way by Adam Newport-Berra, whose work as the Director of Photography is a tremendous follow up to The Last Black Man In San Francisco (one of my favorite movies of 2019 - review here). Everything looks terrific, a perfect example of how form itself can communicate meaning - in this case, the polished glamour, excess, and hedonism on the island shout to us the classic maxim, "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."

As the story proceeds along a familiar thriller track (which at once never gets old and yet here feels a little less effective than contemporary comparisons), Kravitz makes time for plenty of commentary along the way. She navigates modern feminism, exploring explicitly and implicitly the challenges of competition, cooperation, and female identity in our tech-infused world; she captures the toxic traits of our rising technological and networked "manosphere," complete with vapes, peacocking wealth and luxury, and signals of power; she even delves into class and trauma, forgiveness and forgetfulness, and the notion of revenge. Such thematic exploration may leave a mixed response: on the one hand, her themes are cleverly navigated through powerful image making - from phallic statues turned into weapons for justice, pristine white dresses turned blood and dirt stained in bids for freedom, and cooped up hens set free from their stocks, there is much to remember here. She even includes the introduction of a serpent to King's perfect garden, its venom playing a key role in freedom from patriarchal oppression, riffing on the common misunderstanding and mis-teaching of the Genesis garden as an inherently patriarchal text. For better, more faithful explorations of this text and what it's really saying, I've included a few links and books below (in short: it's not patriarchal but remarkably mutual, it's rooted in a deeply profound and beautiful view of human nature, and the serpent's freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be).

On the other hand, all this exploration leads to a third act that is remarkably cynical and perhaps even outright Nietzschean, a perfect encapsulation of our postmodern condition: we are people often well-aware of our problems and pitfalls, and yet also people who feel powerless to create a meaningful path towards healing and reconciliation, opting instead for the self-empowered capturing of our own will, particularly through the satisfaction of our vengeance. Such themes are eminently human, and it's not entirely clear where the film lands on them, another bump in its final moments.

All said, while your mileage may vary, Kravitz's work is undeniably entertaining, thought-provoking, and genuinely original, a timely piece in a culture longing for some solid ground upon which to build our understanding of humanity, relationship, wealth and excess, class, and so much more. At the least, it signals the arrival of a new and impressive filmmaker, one who you won't want to blink twice and miss in the coming years.

*Further Resources on the bible’s affirmation of mutuality and refutation of patriarchy*

1. Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters, by Iain Provan
2. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How The Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, by Beth Allison Barr
3. The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood: How God’s Word Consistently Affirms Gender Equality, by Philip B. Payne
4. Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, by Nijay Gupta
5. Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History, edited by Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek
6. Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives, by Ronald Pierce
7. Jim Singleton’s teaching, visible at this video link
8. Manuscript of N.T. Wright’s lecture on different New Testament passages

Please know that I am also available as a source to listen, process, and help answer any other questions on this front. Feel free to reach out at clint.springpeople@gmail.com!