Welcome to Pitch-Black Paradise. Here’s Why You Won’t Forget Blink Twice
If you revelled in the dark, subversive sting of social commentary thrillers like Get Out or Promising Young Woman, here’s your next favourite.
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Fair warning right up top, Blink Twice is the anaconda of movies: sharp teeth, strong jaws and an absolute refusal to let go. It’s been described as a “#MeToo psychodrama” and a “feminist party-girl nightmare.” As a metaphorical thriller, it shares the same DNA as Get Out – using a genre wrapper to make us gleefully bite into a moral lesson as dark and bitter as an 85% cocoa block.
In the same way that Promising Young Woman gave us a furious revenge story from a victim's perspective, Blink Twice puts our nerves through the wringer on a billionaire's private island to make a strong comment about assault and abusive power. And like Promising Young Woman, this story has also been brought to the screen by a woman.
Blink Twice is such a button-pusher, its studio felt the need to warn us ahead of time. Seen increasingly on streaming, trigger warnings are almost non-existent ahead of theatrical films. But Amazon MGM took the unusual step of issuing one publicly for Blink Twice, posting the following on socials:
Trigger warning:
We are proud to finally share Blink Twice with audiences in theaters worldwide this week.
Blink Twice is a psychological thriller about the abuse of power. While this is a fictionalized movie, it contains mature themes and depictions of violence — including sexual violence.
This may be upsetting or triggering for some viewers.
For resources that offer support, visit BlinkTwiceResources.com.
One last thing: Blink Twice is a puzzle that’s way more satisfying to solve if you don’t know the answers going in. So we’ll tread as carefully around spoilers as we can! If parts of this Guide feel a bit mysterious, it’s because they’re best discovered where the filmmakers intended – on the big screen (with a big bucket of popcorn).
What is Blink Twice about?
It’s the age-old fairytale: when tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) meets cocktail waitress Frida (English BAFTA-winner Naomi Ackie) at his fundraising gala, sparks fly. Okay, maybe it’s more like the modern fairytale that Insta-fluencers dream about. With their chemistry bubbling away, King invites Frida and her bestie Jess (Alia Shawkat) to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. It’s paradise – would you say no?
But despite the epic tropical setting, ever-flowing champagne, and the psilocybin-microdose bonding with beautiful models at all-night dance parties, Frida can sense that there’s something alarming hiding beneath the island’s lush facade. As more and more strange things start to happen, Frida knows there’s something deeply wrong with this place.
She stains her dress at dinner… but a few hours later, it’s spotless. She finds a knife behind her mirror and dirt under her fingernails. WTF? And don’t even go there with the vibrant, venomous yellow snakes that keep hissing around the island’s garden beds. Even more disorienting: each morning, Frida can’t actually remember the night before. Can she actually trust her own sense of reality? And by the way – where’s Jess?!
“I wanted to see a story that explored what might happen if women stop playing by the rules. What if Eve WOKE UP and realised—the Garden of Eden is uh, kinda bullshit. And wait, actually, this place suuuucks. And wait, Adam, you also kinda suck!”
~ Writer/Director Zoë Kravitz
The directorial debut of actress Zoë Kravitz (and daughter of rocker Lenny, for all you trivia hunters), Blink Twice was also co-written by Kravitz, and it’s clearly a story she’s been thinking about for a while. She actually first put pen to paper back in 2017, so the film has been fermenting for years. Maybe that’s why the movie feels so fizzy and dangerous?
“I started writing it pre-#MeToo, pre-Harvey [Weinstein]”, Kravitz said. “Then the world started to have the conversation, so [the script] changed a lot. It became more about a power struggle and what that power struggle means.” The result is a startling thriller, but that’s just the sheep’s clothing around this dark moral exposé. The real wolf is the urgent assault story lying underneath.
Wait, did Blink Twice have a different title?
It sure did. For years, Kravitz was determined that the film would be released under its working title: the spectacularly in-your-face Pussy Island. In interviews, she revealed that it was a deliberate effort to “reclaim the word ‘pussy’” – from a derogatory, male-driven slur connected to mens’ pleasure, to restoring a sense of power and ownership back to women.
“The [original] title [“Pussy Island”] is the seed of the story. It represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we’re out of that time now.”
~ Writer/Director Zoë Kravitz
There’s lots of other examples of reappropriation, like the LGBTQ+ community’s use of “queer” and, infamously, the N-word. But when it comes to slapping an MA15+ rated slang term on billboards, bus posters and movie tickets, Kravitz soon ran into some pretty big roadblocks, including the studio (which found through research that many women were still offended by the word) and the US ratings board, the MPAA.
As it stands, Blink Twice is a pretty great replacement – stemming from a dark “joke” that’s shared between Frida and a vital side character, Slater King’s personal therapist, at the opening mega-rich party. “Blink twice if you’re in danger,” he chuckles, and Frida forces herself to laugh along too. It’s not just foreshadowing; it’s a deliberate reference to codes like the Violence at Home Signal for Help that caught fire on TikTok over 2020.
How does Blink Twice explore sexual assault?
One of the many brave acts that Blink Twice pulls off is that Frida is a complicated heroine who challenges “victim narratives”. She even covertly changes from her waitress uniform to a slinky cocktail dress to infiltrate Slater King’s function after she’s done serving the guests. Frida’s active, not passive, and she doesn’t hide that she wants a better life for herself – but does “better” mean obtaining wealth and financial security, even if it’s provided by a man?
Another interesting clue is when, at the start of the movie, her boss tells Frida to “tone it down” because she got complaints at the last function. She needs to be “less flirty, more invisible.” It’s a mirror of language that comes from people who victim blame – How were you acting towards them? Were you leading them on?
“It's a hard part – she's many things at once. You kind of never really get a real handle on who she is. How manipulative is she? How unaware? Is she the villain? Is she the victim?”
~ Director Zoë Kravitz on the character of Frida
On the island, Frida initially feels as though she’s hit the jackpot. She’s gone from being the one pouring champagne, to the one having champagne poured for her. That’s a heady feeling often used by those in power to manipulate those below them. Whisk them up and above their “social status” to an exciting new space, where their bearings get fuzzy and their judgement is impaired. In Blink Twice, that happens quite literally…
King uses his private resort (and a method we won’t reveal) to blank the memories of Frida and her female cohorts. It’s a spiky metaphor for the confusion and disorientation that victims of rape can experience after their assault. When Frida slowly awakens to what’s going on, she knows she’s in serious danger – which means she has to wear two faces and pretend she doesn’t know what King and his wealthy mates are up to. Just like many real-life assault victims, who are forced to pretend that “everything’s fine.”
As Frida recognises she’s truly trapped, she plots an escape/rescue, but quickly realises that she’s facing a bigger problem: will she be believed? She’s a gig-economy woman of colour up against a white, male billionaire. So often, we’ve seen how that goes. We can almost hear the defence lawyers: Why did you travel to an island with a stranger? Why did you put yourself in that situation?
What does Blink Twice have to say about money and power?
When we first meet Slater King, it’s in a vague apology video. He’s done something wrong (we never learn what exactly), he’s deeply sorry, and he makes a public commitment to learn from his mistakes and grow – blah blah blah. He also takes a page from the billionaire’s “I’ve screwed up” playbook and starts a foundation to absolve his sins. So great news, everything fixed and it’s all better guys!
Ahh, money – it really can buy you a get out of jail free card (we sense that in King’s case, that’s quite literally what happened). It’s the perfect way to set up that this man, for all his noble and sincere-looking gestures, is happy to leverage the dark arts of wealth and power: deception, empty gestures and great PR.
What else do the powerful do to keep themselves on top? Strip others of their agency. When Frida & Jess get to King’s island, their phones are taken away and they’re given an array of matching clothes, swimsuits and perfumes. It’s sold as “you won’t need a single thing – you’re free!” But in reality, it brands them as possessions, like dolls. Or worse, slaves.
“I wanted to explore power - taking back power. How absurd it is that women are asked to forget and pretend and smile through pain, and speak with our eyes because we can't say it out loud. I really wanted to highlight how insane and tiring and fucked up that is.”
~ Writer/Director Zoë Kravitz
Of course, the location is also deeply representative of a huge power imbalance – an island owned by a white American, staffed by indigenous Mexican people. In the story, the location is kept vague (it was actually shot in the Yucatán Jungle in Mexico) but the backdrop of colonialism, and the violent oppression which that brings to mind, all subconsciously play their part. “There's a heavy energy to those places,” admits Kravitz. It’s yet another nod to white men being at the top of the hierarchy.
There’s one last touch that screams ‘wealth’: from the sparkling pool to the billion-thread count sheets, everything looks incredible. That juxtaposition of a dark story happening in a gorgeous place was important for Zoë Kravitz, who wanted to create a psychological thriller that felt contrastingly bright and beautiful. “I wanted the beauty to feel almost aggressive,” she says. “The brighter it was, the more fucked up it was.”
Were the cast kept safe while shooting Blink Twice?
Obviously, the film deals with sexual assault, and press notes for the film explain that the whole cast went into the production with "open eyes and an open dialogue." Producer Tiffany Persons says that there was a women's night where the female cast could discuss what the scene brought up, and then a men's night where the males could.
“These gatherings to talk through the heavy aspects of the film were essential,” Persons shares. “They were a real reflection of the entire cast’s commitment of creating a film with a raw and honest look at the abuse of power – sexually, emotionally, and mentally.”
“It was a sight to see, to watch her in her power, with full agency, lead us all into a place where we felt very safe. We felt very creative. We felt all very connected to each other.”
~ Naomi Ackie on director Zoë Kravitz
The cast met with the intimacy coordinator individually, and when it came time to film the film’s key scene of sexual violence, everyone held hands and took a moment. “The men really asking how they can show up and take care of the women throughout the process, the women thanking the men for being a part of this process and for really going to an uncomfortable place in order to tell this story,” Kravitz reflected. “We were all very much on the same page there. It was beautiful really.”
What are critics saying about Blink Twice?
“Despite the heavier implications of Kravitz’s film, the first-time filmmaker maintains an enviable buzz throughout, twinning humor and rage into one biting package.”
- Kate Erbland, IndieWire
“There’s something about it that just feels new, that the sensibility coming through is not just Kravitz’s, but generational.”
- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
“Kravitz knows exactly how to set this up. And exactly how to knock you down.”
- David Fear, Rolling Stone
So what’s the takeaway from Blink Twice?
With its sensory haze of nail polish, perfume, tequila and snake venom in the air, Blink Twice is an intoxicating mix. But more dizzying is the realisation of what’s really happening on this island, and what that metaphor is really saying about our world. The motifs lure you in, and the message slaps you hard. With apologies to Network, Kravitz is as mad as hell, and she’s not gonna take it anymore.
“This is a film for anyone who says, ‘She shouldn't have been wearing that skirt’”.
~ Actress Naomi Ackie
Like a shimmering diamond, Blink Twice reveals more facets depending on which angles you hold up to the light. Is the brightest one about the men that regard women’s bodies as objects, playthings disconnected from their personas? Owen Gleiberman seemed to agree, writing for Variety: “Blink Twice” turns out to be a feminist allegory of memory… a grand statement about all the things that women are asked (and ask themselves) to forget.”
Or does the film want us to walk out thinking about the ultra-wealthy, and their (seemingly universal) M.O. that society’s rules don’t apply to them? Money doesn’t ONLY buy private real estate, security teams and luxurious toys… it also affords the 1% the opportunity to exploit all of those things. When your victim is a woman of colour with no perceived wealth or status, it’s even easier.
Ultimately, Blink Twice is a moral reckoning for anyone who claims solidarity on social media. The same way that Get Out called out virtue signalers who posted black squares on their grid and said ‘Job done’, Blink Twice is a rude shock for the ‘Not ALL men!’ crowd who need a good shake. It’s a stinging and significant thriller that rubs salt into an open wound. You’re unlikely to forget Blink Twice in a hurry… even if that new title is a touch more tame than Kravitz wanted it to be.
Want a great deal to catch Blink Twice in cinemas?
GRAB YOUR CHEAPER TICKETS HERE!
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