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PORTSIDE CULTURE

BLINK TWICE AND THE PROBLEM WITH #METOO THRILLERS  
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Adrian Horton
August 27, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut joins a microgenre of films,
from Promising Young Woman to Don’t Worry Darling, that try – and
mostly fail – to capture a difficult moment _

Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat in Blink Twice. , Photograph: Courtesy
of Amazon MGM Studios/AP

 

Blink Twice
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Zoë Kravitz’s buzzy directorial debut, opens with lush, confident
seduction. The starry-eyed Frida (Naomi Ackie), a cash-strapped
cater-waiter who yearningly scrolls Instagram in her dingy bathroom,
catches the eye of handsome tech entrepreneur Slater King (Kravitz’s
real-life fiance Channing Tatum, in full charisma mode) at a ritzy
gala; he summarily whisks her and her down-with-it best friend Jess
(Alia Shawkat) to his private tropical island along with a private
jet’s worth of hangers-on. The ostensible goal of the trip is to
party – drink all day, lounge by the pool, soak up the sun, suck the
marrow out of life. You cannot trust a billionaire, but why not enjoy
the spoils?

Kravitz, who co-wrote the film with ET Feigenbaum, similarly relishes
in the sensory pleasures of this thriller’s set-up. She emphasizes
each sound and color, like jungle prey hyper-attuned to sensation –
every heavy-handed flash of red catches the eye, every crackle of a
vape and pop of fresh champagne hits the inner ear. The white of the
(dubiously) house-provided bikinis and linens are striking against the
verdant landscape. Even the obviously symbolic snakes are as alluring
as they are sinister. Of course, not everything is as tranquil as it
seems. Blink Twice, with its pounding, ominous score, makes that clear
from the jump. The propulsive question is exactly what is wrong, and
how Frida – and, by extension, we – will discover it.

Blink Twice – which I keep accidentally referring to as Don’t
Blink Twice, so often does it recall Olivia Wilde’s 2022
film Don’t Worry Darling 
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has been heralded as the latest of so-called #MeToo thrillers and,
unusually for a theatrical release, comes accompanied with a trigger
warning for sexual violence. So the film’s bleak trajectory isn’t
really a surprise. Still, the pulling back of the curtain here feels
particularly anticlimactic, if stomach-churning, given the territory
by similarly flashy #MeToo movies before it, namely Don’t Worry
Darling and Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman
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which seek to provoke, and garner accolades, through the supposedly
transgressive act of portraying the worst possible scenario for its
female characters.

Spoiler alert – as in Don’t Worry Darling, the women in Blink
Twice are stuck in a sunken place without their consent nor awareness.
(Kravitz also unabashedly cribs from Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the
saga of Jeffrey Epstein, and evokes other recent eat-the-rich
thrillers such as Triangle of Sadness, The Menu and Fennell’s
divisive Saltburn.) As in Promising Young Woman
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factor is supposed to be that every man’s true character turns out
to be beyond despicable – each night, after ample champagne and a
mushrooms/MDMA cocktail, the men gang-rape the women, then erase their
memories with a trade-secret elixir whose only antidote is snake
venom. Frida, Jess, Sarah (a standout Adria Arjona), Heather (Trew
Mullan) and Camilla (Liz Caribel) are, as with Don’t Worry
Darling’s 50s-style housewives, essentially unwitting sex slaves
lulled into unquestioning submission by luxury, heinous gaslighting
and some glaring plot holes.

Watching Blink Twice, I was hooked by Kravitz’s confident visual
style and pinpoint timing; her steady handle of cinematic momentum is
such that when the violence begins, it’s easy to submit to a tide of
adrenaline and baseline suspense. But I found myself thinking, from
the minute Frida finds mysterious dirt under her nails and Sarah sees
unexplained bruises – are we doing this again? Are we still stuck in
this loop, reveling in the trick being the reveal of vicious,
pervasive patriarchy? Surely there is something more to say by now?

I, too, feel like I’m repeating myself. Four years ago, I wrote
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how even in 2020, Promising Young Woman’s molten core – that
everyone is the worst possible version of themselves – felt like an
outdated throwback to 2017, in the heady early days of the #MeToo
movement, when exposure, however long overdue and deserved, seemed
like an end unto itself. I wondered when we’d get something more out
of a #MeToo thriller than “actually, patriarchy is a helluva
trip”, the hidden card being the depths of some men’s wicked
misogyny, hiding in plain sight.

[film still of blonde woman and man in checked shirt standing close
together looking at each other]

Carey Mulligan and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in Promising Young
Woman. Photograph: Courtesy of Focus Features/AP

A handful of films
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found some ways around that trap: The Assistant
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Kitty Green’s 2020 film set in an office at a Weinstein-esque
production company, wrung haunting suspense out of the mundane clues
of routine abuse. The Oscar-tipped dramas Women Talking
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on complex women – traumatized, vindictive, selfish, layered – in
an assumed real, patriarchal world. Mimi Cave’s 2022 film Fresh,
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in a similar horror-thriller lane to Blink Twice, succeeded in hewing
more closely to genre expectations than bold, underlined messaging,
even when queasily literalizing the worst metaphors about the modern
dating market. The film succeeds, in part, because the point is not
the grand revelation of depravity but how to survive it, using skills
adapted from enduring years of boilerplate misogyny (listening to men
drone on, pretending to be interested, flattering his sensibilities,
playing dumb at opportune moments). Same, too, for the under-seen, if
too limited, psychological thriller The Royal Hotel
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in which Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick play American backpackers
adapting to, then surviving, a remote and toxically masculine bar in
the Australian outback.

Blink Twice partially gets there, in that Frida and the other women do
have to band together to get out alive. But though the film aims for
serrated, vicious commentary, the life-or-death stakes – very bad
men, women fight to survive – feel ironically low. We’ve seen this
before; as with much of the #MeToo discourse and art that seems more
aimed at platitudes or subject matter accolades than curiosity, or
even just specifics (for female characters, for the mechanics of
story), there’s plenty of shock, without surprise. Kravitz’s film
irked me significantly less than Promising Young Woman, which tried to
finger-wag too much and, like Fennell’s follow-up Saltburn, reeked
of self-satisfaction, or Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde’s supposed
tribute to female pleasure whose simulation twist undercut its own
premise. The revenge in Blink Twice is still sweet, even if the reveal
is hollow. But it’s hard not to feel, even once confidently won
over, that we’re back where we started.

* me too
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* blink twice
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* Zoe Kravitz
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