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After an eruption of laughter, Frida (Naomi Ackie), the heroine of actress turned filmmaker Zoë Kravitz’s stylistically sturdy but narratively undercooked Blink Twice, gets serious. “Something bad is about to happen,” she declares to Slater King (Channing Tatum), the impossibly rich and hot tech billionaire who lies beside her. 

Her suspicions surprise King, but her unease feels sensible, even long overdue, to the viewer. Frida, an art-minded nail artist who pays the bills by waitressing, is a few days into an objectively too-good-to-be-true vacation. Along with a handful of other attractive women that includes her roommate and best friend Jess (an underused Alia Shawkat), Frida’s been invited on an indefinite holiday on a tropical island King bought in the wake of a scandal involving vaguely alluded to abuses of power. (Frida and Jess secured their last-minute invite by chatting up King and his always-swarming posse of friends at a fundraiser they’re serving at.) The paradisiacal getaway, though maybe not the part involving groups of women invitees, is part of a public rebranding — a place for King to unplug and reflect when he’s not attending therapy and making eye-popping donations to charities he swears are not performative gestures.

Frida and the other women don’t initially question why they’ve been brought here; they don’t seem to mind the troubling allegations for which King has unconvincingly apologized. They get along well enough with King and the fleet of other moneyed white men who are also staying here (they’re played by Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, and pitilessly gazed at nepo baby Levon Hawke). And it’s easy to be thankful for lazy, sun-soaked days that require little else besides lounging poolside and consuming endless cocktails and drugs. (Every night naturally ends with a finely prepared multicourse dinner, too.) 

The cast of Blink Twice. All imagery courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios.

But the things that had once seemed semi-excusably odd — the immediate confiscation of cell phones; the way clothes, makeup, and perfume are laid out for all the women and match to a T — start to raise alarm bells after a while, especially once it starts to become clear that the women’s memories are getting incrementally fuzzier. And even if the latter wasn’t happening, this manmade paradise, all orbiting around a sprawling villa that looks like a billowing red barn, crawls with omens. Venomous yellow snakes always creep underfoot. Unable to resist exoticization as a too-easy means of inducing dread, Kravitz and her co-screenwriter, E.T. Feigenbaum, populate the grounds with Indigenous workers inked with framed-as-scary tattoos whose knowing stares pose mysteries and who are strictly silent unless speaking in what amounts to code to be deciphered later.

Blink Twice’s horrors are revealed slowly, first requiring Jess, then Frida, to indulge the idea that they shouldn’t trust this particular breed of male generosity. The more things are uncovered, the more the movie announces itself as a thriller carrying on in the tradition of Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020) and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (2022): handsomely stylized films with fairly elaborate set-ups that culminate in rudimentary critiques of misogyny and the ugly ways it can warp in tandem with enough social capital and power. 

Blink Twice is at least more generous with cathartic bloodshed than those movies. But it lacks a substantively written protagonist à la Promising Young Woman and both of its spiritual predecessors’ sharper relationships to visual presentation. Frida is compelling mostly because Ackie, with her wide-set eyes and fetching gap tooth, is herself a compelling presence with a preternatural gift for evocative expressiveness. As written by Kravitz and Feigenbaum, the character is a cipher with whom we can’t do much besides sympathize and project onto, gravitated to largely because she is positioned as the film’s guiding force. 

Alia Shawkat and Naomi Ackie in Blink Twice.

Frida is nearly as indistinct as the rest of the ensemble, which is invariably written with such scant detail beyond a few personality traits and fun facts (Rex’s character is a passionate foodie; another character, played by the always great, often better-than-the-project-itself Adria Arjona, was on a Survivor-style reality show) as to feel antithetical to a movie outwardly trying to make a point about the dangers of gendered dehumanization. Blink Twice isn’t as interested in its characters’ inner lives as what they represent in the story. But what if the bulk of that story is spent in various states of obfuscation and aversion? 

The movie’s overarching preoccupation with material beauty — and its arguable overemphasis on the heart-stirring charms of Kravitz’s real-life beau Tatum, which the film doesn’t try complicating very much before the narrative truly requires it — suggests, to paraphrase the critic Angelica Jade Bastién, a timidity as it tries commentating on the billionaire class’s evils. (That extends to how the movie ponders the racial dynamics between the characters, which is to say not at all.) By spending so much more time ravishingly spotlighting the spoils of wealth and the movie-star charisma of Tatum than the unsightly things the movie elicits to try to undercut common fetishizations of both, the film’s blows land more softly than likely intended. It’s missing the kind of provocative boldness that was once encapsulated by Pussy Island, the movie’s one-time working title.

How much of that comes from Kravitz, born to famous parents whose notoriety and wealth ensured an advantaged life from birth, never tangibly knowing the financial desperation and specific strains of upper-crust contempt and envy her lower-middle-class women characters know too well? From Kravitz’s vantage, Frida’s and Jess’ struggles feel more like hypotheticals than urgently felt realities. It says a lot that the out-of-touch, girlboss-style ending is positioned as an inspiriting win.