Blink Twice Loses Sight Of Its Smartest Ideas

“Blink twice if I’m in danger.”

It’s a joke on Frida’s (Naomi Ackie) part, but when she says it to Rich (Kyle MacLachlan), the psychiatrist to Channing Tatum’s enigmatic tech billionaire Slater King, he blinks. Strangely, when they meet next, on the private island where Slater has spirited Frida away after she crashed his gala, Rich doesn’t seem to remember her. It’s one of the many curious moments that comprise the build-up to the twisted revelation of Zoë Kravitz’s darkly stylish psychological thriller, Blink Twice.

The film was formerly known as Pussy Island, which would have been far too cheeky a title for such a surprisingly dark film. Rather, Blink Twice is an unnerving social satire that attempts to get to the root of “cancel culture” — and kind of succeeds.

Blink Twice follows Frida, a cocktail waitress who desperately needs a vacation. When she and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) crash the gala celebrating Slater’s comeback, she meets him and they hit it off. Frida and Slater (who’s facing some troubling allegations) flirt the whole night, and, on a whim, he asks her to join him on a trip to his private island.

At first, it seems like paradise. Each meal is catered by Slater’s friend Cody (Simon Rex), a professional chef. Days are spent lounging by the pool; nights in a narcotic-addled haze. But gradually, Frida starts to notice something amiss. The staff smile creepily. There are whole stretches of the night she doesn’t remember. And she keeps finding dirt under her fingernails. All these oddities are easy to brush off until one day, Jess goes missing. And for some reason, no one but Frida remembers she was ever there.

With Kravitz’s directorial debut, she demonstrates a remarkable tonal confidence and strong sense of style, but there’s one glaring flaw at the center of Blink Twice, one that evaded me for as long as the film’s central mystery evades Frida. Blink Twice is playing at being an eat-the-rich social satire without a real idea of what that means. All the hallmarks are there: the oversaturated colors, the mundane microaggressions that cut like a knife, the intense close-ups, the darkly comic tone. But Blink Twice’s satire ultimately feels hollow because Kravitz, by her very her upbringing, is unsuited to making a truly authentic eat-the-rich movie. Kravitz and screenwriter E.T. Feigenbaum’s script borrows from greater social satires before it, but fails to come to a more complex resolution than men are evil. A fair point to make, but not one that needs to be withheld as long Blink Twice does.

Much of Blink Twice is spent setting up its uncanny premise, before it spends the rest of its runtime building up to an explosive third act. Kravitz has fun creating this bizarro island paradise. The women arrive to find private rooms filled with clothes sized perfectly for them and special perfume. The cocktails are bottomless. The food is delicious. The men are a little intense, but fun. But Kravitz’s hand is too light when it comes to showing why everything is a little off — the hedonistic montages come off more as glossy advertisements than uncanny images of a false paradise. The only thing that communicates something is off are Slater’s silent, smiling employees. But as the film builds to its twist, Kravtiz’s inability to do more with this nameless, wordless staff — who in a better director’s hands, might have played into the film’s whole “eat-the-rich” message — only reveals the hypocrisy at the center of Blink Twice’s satire.

It’s a shame, because the performances are all fantastic. Naomi Ackie anchors the movie as the intrepid Frida, who makes for a compelling Final Girl in the vein of Ready of Not’s Samara Weaving. Adria Arjona is another fun standout as Sarah, another girl brought on this trip whose icy demeanor gives way to a fierce survivor’s instinct. It’s when Frida and Sarah finally pair up that Blink Twice gets its mojo — they’re an intensely watchable duo that could have helped us through the film’s shaggy middle part. The rest of the ensemble plays little more than archetypes, though Christian Slater, Simon Rex, and Haley Joel Osment have fun with it, even if they aren’t offered much to do. But Tatum is the scene-stealer as Slater, a seemingly zen rich guy who’s into holistic healing and therapy, while hiding darker impulses. Seeing Tatum play against type is one of the joys of Blink Twice, even if it Kravitz never takes full advantage of his performance.

Blink Twice is a movie clearly made in the shadow of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but in trying to capitalize on the ultra-luxe vision of recent eat-the-rich hits like Saltburn, it comes across as tonally confused — even a little tone-deaf. It’s frustrating because it’s clear that Kravitz wants to make an important movie. But without a clear message at its core, Blink Twice is only a hollow imitation of the social satires its aping.

Blink Twice opens in theaters August 23.