First, a small but significant observation: I understand why the producers went in this direction, but retitling a project known at script stage as Pussy Island as the vastly more generic Blink Twice strikes me as almost as sad a loss to the world's marquees as when Ben Wheatley steered 2018's Happy New Year, Colin Burstead away from its initial Colin, You Anus. Beyond that: while making a watchable - possibly, as we shall see, too watchable - directorial debut, the actress Zoë Kravitz has delivered between 55-60% of a worthwhile film. Blink Twice opens with a fullscreen trigger warning, then proceeds with a half-hour of set-up that neatly captures what it may well be to get pulled into the orbit of someone with unlimited resources. In this case, party boy tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), handing a pair of lowly caterers working his latest function - Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) - the golden ticket of an all-expenses-paid trip to his sunkissed private island for a weekend of drug-fuelled R&R. In these early scenes, Kravitz demonstrates two gifts. First, she has an eye for screen-filling faces you're only too happy to watch: King's entourage - a ragtail mix of crypto bros and app developers, reality starlets and washed-up hangers-on - is fleshed out by such welcome, long-overlooked performers as Christian Slater, Geena Davis (as a klutz of a PA), Haley Joel Osment and Simon Rex. Second, she deploys a thoughtful, distinctive editing strategy that consciously pushes towards discombobulation, if not outright incoherence. Nothing squares up as we expect once we get to the island; it's day, then suddenly it's night; we get but glimpses of the good life, alluring flashes of the big brass ring, rather than the full picture you and I might need to reassure us. That back-up title comes from a line Frida jokingly puts to King's grinning shrink (Kyle MacLachlan, one symbol of the movie's aspirations to Lynch) early on: "Blink twice if I'm in danger." The shrink duly blinks, twice. Our girls are in trouble, all right, but so are we, and - like our starstruck heroine - we're too caught up in this glitzy demi-monde to back out slowly and head home. By staying seated, however, what we witness is the degree to which Kravitz herself is flirting with disaster.
Blink Twice turns out to be three movies for the price of one, and you will have to weigh the success the writer-director makes of the first two against the anticlimactic mess she makes of the last. The freshest material here comes in the guise of a hangout movie, a loaded portrait of the idle rich that must have come easily to the switched-on daughter of showbiz royalty. Whether handing Ackie and Shawkat studio-money wardrobe changes or gilding scenes with the James Brown back catalogue, Kravitz is nothing if not alert to the many ways money throbs, thrusts, dazzles and seduces. The middle stretch is a decent enough bad trip, evoking what it is to be removed from reality and off the clock: immense fun at first, clearly, then disconcerting and even disturbing, the women waking up with bruised arms and dirt under their fingernails. (Those offbeat cuts suddenly correspond to blackouts.) Only in its final third does Blink Twice fall apart, revealed as a rather cartoonish, sometimes silly film to have made about what it's actually about; like a lot of Hollywood responses to the #MeToo moment, it doesn't really feel up to the task of correcting the behaviour it wants to indict. Some part of the film has been torn from the headlines - without giving too much away, it's dramatising what it is to become the plaything of rich and powerful men - yet despite that pre-emptive trigger warning, those headlines have been milked for mid, recent Shyamalan-level suspense (sneaking around offices, third-act reveals) rather than the flesh-creeping horror one felt watching Kitty Green's The Assistant and The Royal Hotel. Everything, not just the title, has been softened for ready multiplex consumption, any hint of chill countered by sunny surrealism, more pop, jokes, Tatum swag, even comedy chickens. This tactic of making-nice with regard to the film's big issue arguably corresponds to the position of women in the real world, compelled to avoid making too great a scene so as to stay employed - but it also sneaks into the film's botched ending, in which this status quo is decisively preserved. Best not upset the suits; keep calm and business as usual. Green - whose confrontational fictions have been informed by her documentary work, and depend on us seeing abusive behaviour for what it is - would likely have gone further and retitled Blink Twice as Rape Island. You don't need to open with a trigger warning when you call a movie that.
Blink Twice is currently playing in cinemas nationwide.
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