Blink Twice (15) |Close-Up Film Review

Actress Zoë Kravitz makes an impressive debut as director here in a thriller which is a fast moving and good looking mix of slasher horror and feminism.

Cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) first comes across tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) in a video clip on her mobile phone, where he is humbly apologising for some unspecified bad behaviour for which he is “in therapy”.   Intrigued, she and her best mate Jess (Alia Shawkat) manage to gatecrash a fund raising gala he’s holding. 

Frida gets into conversation with Slater, who then invites her and Jess to join him and his friends right now on a private plane to his very own island paradise.  No need for luggage – everything will be provided – food, clothes, perfume, luxurious accommodation, sunshine by the pool and lots and lots of booze and psychedelic drugs.  Best party ever.

Slater’s team are nearly all middle aged men, the guests all pretty girls. Shades of Jeffery Epstein’s luxury island but with grown women.  First clue all may not be good news is when the women’s mobile phones are confiscated on arrival;  another is the clothes they are given to wear – virgin white with no underwear.

However the drug fuelled fun, fun, fun keeps the party going but soon Frida smells a rat – or rather the snakes that the enigmatic maid of the house ((María Elena Olivares) is killing.  She seems to be warning Frida of something – but what?   What is it with all the Polaroid photos that the men keep taking?  And why does Frida keep waking up with dirt under her beautifully manicured nails?  The answer when it comes through the flashbacks Frida starts getting is not unexpected but the way it plays out is.   And Ackie, with her large, expressive eyes leads us through the twists of the story beautifully.   If a slasher movie can be classy, this is the one.

The film’s also interesting in terms of the number of once good looking actors playing the seedy, sleazy middle aged men in the party.  Tatum himself is a pretty well preserved mid-forties – he made another Magic Mike film only last year – and he plays the softly bearded Slater with a mixture of appealingly diffident sexiness contrasted with scary bullying.  His cohorts include Christian Slater (mid 50s), Kyle MacLachlan (a bit of a grey fox now in his mid-sixties) and Haley Joel Osment, who it seems but yesterday was that cute little boy in Sixth Sense and AI.  He’s now a rather paunchy mid-30s.  

Sorry to do the age thing, fellas, but women get it all the time.  And this is a #MeToo type film.