Blink Twice: a Crotty quick-take.

Are you having a good time? A spoiler-free review.

I am not a fan of this millennium’s horror fare. The films are often frantic, dumbed down for infantile, ahistorical, Tik-Tok brains, and not as sophisticated as genre classics like The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Silence of the Lambs. A horror-thriller with a #MeToo punch, Blink Twice is a notable exception.

Directed by Zoë Kravitz (Lenny’s daughter), the film stars Channing Tatum and Naomi Ackie, with cameos by Christian Slater and Geena Davis. Set on a figurative Epstein Island, it’s a mix of Triangle of Sadness, Saltburn, and Midsommar, in a smart critique of billionaire tech schmucks.

For a directorial debut, this is pretty sophisticated filmmaking––a snake bite yielding memory access is a nice flip of the Biblical script––with puzzles within puzzles related to animals on fingernails, a mysterious red bag, and a fascinating debate about whether forgetting or remembering is the best remedy for trauma. Though, at one hour and forty-two minutes, this ambitious social critique is still about twelve minutes too long (cut two of the food scenes) and sometimes too clever by half. Kravitz’s caricature of men and their craven motives is sophomoric at best. She tells too much—not leaving enough unsaid to unpack after the film’s denouement—yet not enough so that we grasp and care about the characters and their plight.

Kravitz’s story could have been creepier in a subtler, more mature director’s hands: more Kitty Green’s The Assistant, less Jordan Peele. Yet, in Kravitz’s defense, I suspect she was not shooting for a high-brow, Oscar-worthy mind warp but for mass-market revenge porn. On those pedestrian terms, the film is highly effective at delivering its troubling message––stupidly telegraphed early on with an absurd trigger warning. It’s also visually compelling, with a perversely hilarious aspect that works despite the sensitive material.

Still, Blink Twice left me wanting to know the whole, unredacted truth about the sick, amoral monsters that gave rise to the #MeToo movement: Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. If what Kravitz reveals in Blink Twice is remotely what happened in real life, there’s a much more snaky story left to tell.