Blink Twice is a glitzy thrill ride that gets lost in the darkness of its own ideas

Zoë Kravitz’s passion for making movies is written all over Blink Twice, Amazon MGM’s new psychological thriller starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum. You can see it in the feature’s meticulously crafted shots and hear it in every carefully placed needle drop. Blink Twice is a promising directorial debut from Kravitz — especially when the film is focused on enchanting you with its glamorous depiction of celebrity. But an impressive eye for the aesthetic can only do so much to carry a story that’s as thorny and difficult as Blink Twice’s. And while many of the movie’s core ideas about sex and power are potent, Blink Twice struggles to explore them in a way that feels substantive or original.

Aside from the fact that she has an unusually good memory for faces, there doesn’t seem to be that much out of the ordinary about cater waiter Frida (Naomi Ackie) as Blink Twice opens the night before she and her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkawt) are meant to be working at a big gala. Under any other circumstance, spending an evening waiting hand and foot on boozed-up, uber-wealthy elites might sound like a nightmare to Frida, who dreams of being able to quit and pursue her passion for nail art. But with the big party being a celebration for embattled billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum), Frida — one of many people smitten with the famous tech bro — can’t help but get excited at the possibility of seeing him. And when their paths do eventually cross, it isn’t long before he invites both women to his private island for a vacation getaway.

Though there’s a frenzied, rushed quality to Blink Twice’s opening act, Kravitz and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra cleverly use that energy to establish the film as one that’s trying to channel the disorienting experience of being pulled into a superstar’s orbit. Everything about the champagne-soaked world of excess that King and his elite friends / employees (Simon Rex, Geena Davis, Haley Joel Osment, Christian Slater, Levon Hawke) exist in is strange to Frida and Jess. But the undeniable beauty of it all — the private jet, the island, the elaborate multicourse dinners chased with premium drugs — is enough to convince Don’t Blink’s heroines that King has welcomed them to a wonderland.

Kravitz, who cowrote Don’t Blink’s script with High Fidelity’s E.T. Feigenbaum, wants you to feel the fantasy, too, as Frida’s days on the island start blending together into a dreamlike blur of lazy afternoons by the pool and drunken nights running under the stars. Because Don’t Blink takes so many cues from recent horrors like The Menu and Ready or Not, though, it’s hard not to see the film’s dark twists coming from a distance.

Part of the problem is that few of Don’t Blink’s characters have all that much texture to them aside from Tatum’s King and Sarah (Adria Arjona), a former contestant on a Survivor-like show who also shows up on the island looking to party. Aside from one important monologue that falls rather flat, Tatum does a serviceable job of embodying King as an eccentric, yet charming recluse laying low to rehabilitate his image after a very public scandal. And Arjona’s Sarah — a professional celebrity famous for her ability to survive in stressful situations — is a surprise delight whose performance brings some much-needed levity to the film as things start to turn sinister.

But there is so little substance to Frida’s personality outside of her infatuation with King that the character often feels two-dimensional save for a handful of moments when the movie abruptly shifts gears just long enough for her to point out (more for the audience’s benefit) how weird being on the island feels. Those fleeting scenes give Ackie a chance to show off her range, and you can almost feel how much more unnerving Don’t Blink might be if the film showed us more of its heroine’s complexity before she loses it to the island’s strange magic. But for narrative reasons, Kravitz saves Frida’s interiority for Don’t Blink’s dizzying final act when the full picture of its mysterious puzzle comes into focus.

To the film’s credit, it’s an exercise in horror storytelling that’s actually trying to articulate several very specific things about gender and sexual violence rather than just coasting on unsettling vibes. As Don’t Blink peels back the layers of its central mystery, it becomes exceedingly clear that Kravitz means for it to hit many of the same nerves as Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. But whereas those films’ messages about power and trauma were more carefully woven into their narratives on a technical level, Blink Twice hamfistedly spits its ideas out with a bravado that isn’t entirely earned. 

With a bit more polish and time spent making its players feel like actual people, Blink Twice’s attempts to shock you with a heavily telegraphed pivot into metaphorical horror might work much more effectively. Instead, the film lands somewhere closer to Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, which is to say stylish but somewhat lacking in its ability to unpack its central themes.

Blink Twice works fairly well on a surface level as a glitzy popcorn thriller that will make your skin crawl. But Kravitz is also clearly striving for more here — and the film never quite hits that deeper level of meaning that would turn it into something truly special.

Blink Twice also stars Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen, Kyle MacLachlan, Cris Costa, and María Elena Olivares. The film is in theaters now.