Blink Twice and the Problem With #MeToo Thrillers
Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz’s buzzy directorial debut, opens with lush, confident seduction. The starry-eyed Frida (Naomi Ackie), a cash-strapped cater-waiter who yearningly scrolls Instagram in her dingy bathroom, catches the eye of handsome tech entrepreneur Slater King (Kravitz’s real-life fiance Channing Tatum, in full charisma mode) at a ritzy gala; he summarily whisks her and her down-with-it best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) to his private tropical island along with a private jet’s worth of hangers-on. The ostensible goal of the trip is to party – drink all day, lounge by the pool, soak up the sun, suck the marrow out of life. You cannot trust a billionaire, but why not enjoy the spoils?
Kravitz, who co-wrote the film with ET Feigenbaum, similarly relishes in the sensory pleasures of this thriller’s set-up. She emphasizes each sound and color, like jungle prey hyper-attuned to sensation – every heavy-handed flash of red catches the eye, every crackle of a vape and pop of fresh champagne hits the inner ear. The white of the (dubiously) house-provided bikinis and linens are striking against the verdant landscape. Even the obviously symbolic snakes are as alluring as they are sinister. Of course, not everything is as tranquil as it seems. Blink Twice, with its pounding, ominous score, makes that clear from the jump. The propulsive question is exactly what is wrong, and how Frida – and, by extension, we – will discover it.
Blink Twice – which I keep accidentally referring to as Don’t Blink Twice, so often does it recall Olivia Wilde’s 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling – has been heralded as the latest of so-called #MeToo thrillers and, unusually for a theatrical release, comes accompanied with a trigger warning for sexual violence. So the film’s bleak trajectory isn’t really a surprise. Still, the pulling back of the curtain here feels particularly anticlimactic, if stomach-churning, given the territory by similarly flashy #MeToo movies before it, namely Don’t Worry Darling and Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman, which seek to provoke, and garner accolades, through the supposedly transgressive act of portraying the worst possible scenario for its female characters.
Spoiler alert – as in Don’t Worry Darling, the women in Blink Twice are stuck in a sunken place without their consent nor awareness. (Kravitz also unabashedly cribs from Jordan Peele’s Get Out and the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, and evokes other recent eat-the-rich thrillers such as Triangle of Sadness, The Menu and Fennell’s divisive Saltburn.) As in Promising Young Woman, the shock factor is supposed to be that every man’s true character turns out to be beyond despicable – each night, after ample champagne and a mushrooms/MDMA cocktail, the men gang-rape the women, then erase their memories with a trade-secret elixir whose only antidote is snake venom. Frida, Jess, Sarah (a standout Adria Arjona), Heather (Trew Mullan) and Camilla (Liz Caribel) are, as with Don’t Worry Darling’s 50s-style housewives, essentially unwitting sex slaves lulled into unquestioning submission by luxury, heinous gaslighting and some glaring plot holes.
Watching Blink Twice, I was hooked by Kravitz’s confident visual style and pinpoint timing; her steady handle of cinematic momentum is such that when the violence begins, it’s easy to submit to a tide of adrenaline and baseline suspense. But I found myself thinking, from the minute Frida finds mysterious dirt under her nails and Sarah sees unexplained bruises – are we doing this again? Are we still stuck in this loop, reveling in the trick being the reveal of vicious, pervasive patriarchy? Surely there is something more to say by now?
I, too, feel like I’m repeating myself. Four years ago, I wrote about how even in 2020, Promising Young Woman’s molten core – that everyone is the worst possible version of themselves – felt like an outdated throwback to 2017, in the heady early days of the #MeToo movement, when exposure, however long overdue and deserved, seemed like an end unto itself. I wondered when we’d get something more out of a #MeToo thriller than “actually, patriarchy is a helluva trip”, the hidden card being the depths of some men’s wicked misogyny, hiding in plain sight.
Carey Mulligan and Christopher Mintz-Plasse in Promising Young Woman. Photograph: Courtesy of Focus Features/AP
A handful of films have found some ways around that trap: The Assistant, Kitty Green’s 2020 film set in an office at a Weinstein-esque production company, wrung haunting suspense out of the mundane clues of routine abuse. The Oscar-tipped dramas Women Talking and Tár focused on complex women – traumatized, vindictive, selfish, layered – in an assumed real, patriarchal world. Mimi Cave’s 2022 film Fresh, operating in a similar horror-thriller lane to Blink Twice, succeeded in hewing more closely to genre expectations than bold, underlined messaging, even when queasily literalizing the worst metaphors about the modern dating market. The film succeeds, in part, because the point is not the grand revelation of depravity but how to survive it, using skills adapted from enduring years of boilerplate misogyny (listening to men drone on, pretending to be interested, flattering his sensibilities, playing dumb at opportune moments). Same, too, for the under-seen, if too limited, psychological thriller The Royal Hotel, in which Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick play American backpackers adapting to, then surviving, a remote and toxically masculine bar in the Australian outback.
Blink Twice partially gets there, in that Frida and the other women do have to band together to get out alive. But though the film aims for serrated, vicious commentary, the life-or-death stakes – very bad men, women fight to survive – feel ironically low. We’ve seen this before; as with much of the #MeToo discourse and art that seems more aimed at platitudes or subject matter accolades than curiosity, or even just specifics (for female characters, for the mechanics of story), there’s plenty of shock, without surprise. Kravitz’s film irked me significantly less than Promising Young Woman, which tried to finger-wag too much and, like Fennell’s follow-up Saltburn, reeked of self-satisfaction, or Don’t Worry Darling, Wilde’s supposed tribute to female pleasure whose simulation twist undercut its own premise. The revenge in Blink Twice is still sweet, even if the reveal is hollow. But it’s hard not to feel, even once confidently won over, that we’re back where we started.