A still from ‘Blink Twice’
Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz’ directorial debut is so assured that you feel like you are watching an auteur with several films under her belt. More power to you, Zoë! Put Blink Twice beside Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers… and the contrast is felt even more sharply.
Blink Twice
Director: Zoë Kravitz
Cast: Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis, Alia Shawkat
Storyline: A cocktail waitress and her friend are bewitched when a tech billionaire whisks them off to his private island and then all the trouble starts
Duration: 102 minutes
The other striking thing about Blink Twice is a reminder of how often tech billionaires are cast as the villains of the millennium — is that jealousy or what? Blink Twice is visually arresting — the frames, with a preponderance of primary colours including luscious red, blinding white and fiery yellow, make you wish to consume the picture whole, reminding one of early Tarsem Singh. There is this feeling of a sensory overload, where the colours are brighter and sounds clearer, like all those mind-bending experiments of one’s misbegotten youth.
Written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, Blink Twice tells the story of a cocktail waitress, Frida (Naomi Ackie), who catches the eye of tech moghul Slater King (Channing Tatum) at a fundraiser. King has done some bad things in the past but has publicly apologised for his wickedness and is now a good boy thanks to his therapist Rich (Kyle MacLachlan-Trey from Sex and the City).
The opening scene where Frida and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) prepare for the gala is reminiscent of the party preparation scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet. The other callback to the Claire Daines-Leonardo DiCaprio starrer is the drug-fuelled ‘Young Hearts Run Free’. Frida and Jess are invited to join King and his friends on a tropical island. It seems like a dream getaway, with gourmet food, wine, sunshine and surf and a seemingly endless supply of psychotropic substances.
A still from ‘Blink Twice’
King’s friends include his righthand man Vic (Christian Slater), who is missing a finger and does not like to talk about how it went missing (the truth is horrific), fine dining enthusiast Cody (Simon Rex), straight-as-an-arrow Tom (Haley Joel Osment) and his overburdened assistant Stacy (Geena Davis), who refuses to accept any help. Sarah (Adria Arjona) one of the party girls, is initially hostile to Frida and there is also a maid (María Elena Olivares) who mumbles “red rabbit” whenever she sees Frida.
Frida slowly realises all is definitely not right in this paradise and the more she digs the more horror she uncovers. The movie starts off slowly with scenes that do not necessarily segue smoothly. There is also a problem with things happening rather arbitrarily — maybe it is to give that psychedelic sense of events and conversations fading in and out without following a chronological order. It was distracting though, as it took you out of the film to wonder, how did that happen or how did she get there, and why is the drug and antidote kept in the same place.
The acting is superb (Tatum rocks) and like mentioned before, the dream-like visuals are captivating. The music takes you back to campus and questions of life, the universe and everything including memory and forgetting which is one of the themes of the film. On top of everything else, the censoring was intrusive especially considering the blurred vape was a crucial plot point. With tighter editing, Blink Twice would have been a great film, instead of an unsettling curiosity. And where was that trigger warning
Blink Twice is currently running in theatres