Starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Geena Davis  

Directed by Zoë Kravitz

Amazon MGM, In cinemas now.

A struggling cocktail waitress is invited by a tech billionaire to his private island for a dream vacation – but what kind of dream, exactly?

There’s no doubt about it, Zoë Kravitz’s feature debut, Blink Twice, is an assured and stylish 102 minutes of intelligent, absorbing big screen entertainment. This confident horror-thriller is an in-your-face post-feminist kick-in-the-nethers response to a world where the violent misogyny of the celebrity super-rich, from Jeffrey Epstein to Andrew Tate isn’t just a male conspiracy, but all too often given a free pass (if not a helping hand) by women themselves. The movie’s working title perhaps expresses its more acrid ambivalences more successfully. It was originally called Pussy Island.

The references to Epstein are barely disguised. Cocktail waitress Frida (played by British actress Naomi Ackie, owning the screen) is owned by her feelings of inferiority and invisibility, so when charming tech billionaire Slater King (a brilliantly empty Channing Tatum) invites her to his private island, seemingly to be chaperoned by his assistant Stacy (Gina Davis), it’s as if someone is ‘seeing’ her at last. The flattery of men, rather than cash, is the lure, and Frida is more than willing to play along with the wild, drug-fueled parties, until she starts to ask questions of mysterious bruises she can’t explain, and the earth under her fingernails that seems to have come from nowhere.

It’s only when her friend, Jess, is bitten by a snake and starts to express her doubts that Frida realises that something is wrong with her memory, and she joins forces with another of the young women trapped on the island to unravel the mystery, leading to a bloody and violent denouement. While, technically, the movie is more of a psychological (and often satirical) thriller mystery, it’s framed as a voodoo slasher horror, which is both the movie’s strength, but perhaps also its downfall.

Despite the slickness of Kravitz’s concept, there are two stonking great flaws in its realisation. First up, the plot mechanics are just too daft. Avoiding spoilers, we’re basically talking about magic potions, like something from a fairy tale. This one does one thing, that one does something else, and snake venom, for some reason (Miltonian, I suspect) does another. But because the specifics of how it all works don’t quite hang together I found it silly and distracting, whereas of course date rape drugs are anything but.

Far more importantly, however, is that despite having chosen horror as the medium for her #MeToo takedown, sadly, the reality of what Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did is far more horrific. The girls in Epstein’s villas were far, far younger than the twenty and thirty somethings in this movie, and, of course, no one bothered with magic potions.

Verdict: Despite – or perhaps because of – these issues, Blink Twice is a fascinating film that is definitely worth anyone’s time. There’s plenty to argue about, but that’s all to the good. We need to be arguing about this stuff. It’s a more-than-decent stab (so to speak) at confronting a serious contemporary subject. 7/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com