Blink Twice and you Might Miss the Thrills and Spills of Zoë Kravitz’s Debut Feature

Blink Twice preview screening provided by Universal Pictures.

It’s 2024 and movie characters in thrillers are none the wiser, still choosing to vacation with strangers on secluded islands in the middle of nowhere. That idea has tickled the fancy of first time director Zoë Kravitz whose star studded feature Blink Twice, which she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, is ripe with dark humour, bubbling tension, and is gripping from start to finish.

As it turns out, Instagram doesn’t tell you about stranger danger, at least not to Frida (Naomi Ackie). She’s a barely-getting-by waitress who we meet as she’s scrolling through the social media app before finding herself enthralled by millionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) in a strange apology video he’s issued. Whether for better or worse (which becomes clear as the pace picks up), she clumsily meets him while waitressing at a fundraising event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), and when he asks her if she’d like to come to his private island, of course she says yes.

She’s not the only one who takes up his offer to ‘party it up’, as though this is one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s yacht getaways. King has decided to bring a whole group, one that’s comprised of celebrities like Sarah (Adria Arjona), his troupe of mates (Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Levon Hawke, Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen, and Kyle MacLachlan), and a few other unsuspecting souls.

The real fun and games commence on the island, which has a sprawling resort-like quality; frequently smiling, somewhat off-kilter staff; slithering snakes; and enough drugs to kill a herd of elephants. It’s hard to think one would ever want to leave when every day seems like a holiday, even if you don’t quite know what day it is and what happened yesterday —that’s all part of the deal, or so Frida tries to tell herself.

For what it’s worth, Ackie’s performance is solid, and when paired with Shawkat (and later, Arjona) she’s really able to lean into the constant state of flux that her character finds herself in. Coming off the back of his performance in Fly Me to the Moon (2024), Tatum is also able to hold his own, playing his rich, handsome but slightly-off/too-good-to-be-true character with a distant edge, proving that he can hold the weight of a tense scene with an equally tense gaze and charming quality.

Where similar debut thrillers like Don’t Worry Darling (2022) often have a promising start, they tend to struggle to bring plot points together in the final act and tailspin within their own twists and turns. In saying that, knowing that this is Kravitz’s debut feature is almost as wild as the film’s premise. Her direction is assured and distinct, and I was often reminded of Jordan Peele and his approach to his debut feature Get Out (2017), from which this film clearly takes inspiration from.

Kravitz’s style is especially evident in the groovy soundtrack and the frequently blunt, yet edgy, but altogether humorous, dialogue. Coupled with Kathryn J. Schubert’s snappy editing, which gives both a feeling of intoxication/trippiness as well as the flittering of time, the title Blink Twice reverberates deep into the film’s technical elements. It also helps that Kravitz is able to get all of her nuts and bolts into roughly 90-minutes where so many filmmakers today struggle to write compact scripts that don’t overstay their welcome. If Blink Twice is anything to go by, we’ll be talking about Zoë Kravitz a lot more in years to come.

Blink Twice opens nationally from the 22nd of August.