This smells like Don’t Worry Darling. Prominent female actor turned director ✅ A plot where a man gets his jollies off control, while his female subjugates struggle to decipher what’s going on ✅ So the number one task for Blink Twice is to not be so embittered as Don’t Worry Darling. Because I like Zoë Kravitz. I want to continue to like Zoë Kravitz.
Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) get the opportunity of a lifetime, when their work function happens to be hosting Slater King (Channing Tatum) – a prominent societal figure who owns a holiday island, and delights the girls when he asks them to accompany him. When the girls arrive, among a pithy group, they are strangely obliged to give up their phones, and find bungalows with dresses waiting for them. Yet, they get to lounge by the pool, enjoy copious amounts of drugs, and experience fine dining, so the pros certainly seem to outweigh the cons. But the days fly by, and roll into one, with their memories on the matter becoming increasingly dubious at best.
🎶 Oh! Blink Twice. For it’s another day for you and me in paradise… 🎶 Phil Collins was onto something when he wrote that 😄 Firstly, a couple of things that the movie did well – I liked the pairing of Heather (Trew Mullen) with the chickens in the cage near the end. I like the way the boys seem to swoop down on Frida and Sarah (Adria Arjona), for one scene of mini jump-scares right after Frida sneaks back from searching Slater’s quarters, and must take a hit of that… FAT BLUNT!! I like that the movie involves that daft twink, Lucas (Levon Hawke), as one of the victims, as an example of representation that thickens the soup, and shows that it’s not just women that these men will target. I didn’t expect Frida to save Slater at the end either, so that was a nice surprise too; and I like this one shot at the party, where I think Rich (Kyle MacLachlan) walks out of frame, but instead of the camera moving, Slater proudly backs into it, getting a point across of his self-serving arrogance 👍 But all these moments are offset by the movie’s whole, and a whole lot of things that annoyed me. From the first scene, this movie lingers so hard on Frida’s scar, while she’s watching her phone, four times(!), with the fourth coming in even closer, as if not to trust an audience to notice it, or have faith that the movie is strong enough to leave a detail like that as an Easter egg for some people to find on repeat viewings. And later on, at the party, Frida says something about her memory, while the camera is prominent on her scar again! I mean, there’s laying it on thick, and then there’s foregoing the knife to plonk a whole tub of butter on your toast.
Naomi Ackie is fine, as the lead of this picture, but I would give my MVP to Adria Arjona as Sarah; so kudos to Blink Twice for giving her a role more extensive than being Mechagodzilla’s bitchy compadre in Godzilla vs. Kong (Correction: it wasn’t Adria Arjona in Godzilla vs. Kong, it was Eiza Gonzalez 🤦♂️ How embarrassing. I could delete my previous statement but I’m too joyed by the phrase “Mechagodzilla’s bitchy compadre”, so I’ll leave it in. Arjona was instead the love interest in Morbius, and I remember she was totally not the worst part of that movie, otherwise stinky.) Frida’s drive becomes increasingly important as the movie goes on, but we really don’t know anything about her. She’s initially passive, timid, uncertain of her future, and even through a few twists and turns, it doesn’t unlock more. Channing Tatum is also having a good time, but Slater King is hollow. What’s he famous for? What’s he mad at? Too tired of saying sorry? 😄 For what? We don’t know. I think this is one area where a creator like Jordan Peele would excel in shaping an existence with more information.
For bigger problems, I have questions. While I’m really uncomfortable typing this, and rape is absolutely bad enough, but we’re really not shown Slater King doing anything more than that, which is strange since Frida is completely interested in Slater, he wouldn’t need to force it 😕 The only scene we get of the debauchery could easily show how Slater gets violent, or how Frida would quite rightly react to the horrors of the other girls being abused, and needed to be subdued. Sarah, again, might be the best example of the worst things happening on this island, as we see she is clearly not ever into Cody’s advances, while repeatedly and terribly abused 😔 Next, the photos imply that many unscrupulous men have been coming to the island for gift bags, involving the perfume, to presumedly make their women forget, across the world. So why hold a demonstration for a business venture on an island that also holds the antidote? You’re trusting one woman’s snake wrangling abilities to not undo your entire operation. And what’s her story? What’s she doing to stop her sisters getting repetitiously raped? I’m leaning towards believing that the movie wants us to walk down the “mysterious” and “downtrodden” foreigner route with her, where we forgive her, trapped and playing catch-up in a white man’s world, because the alternative would be that she’s a complicit cunt.
Cody (Simon Rex) at one point objects to the men’s activities, saying “they remember, so we’re going to hell!”, and, no, honey, that’s not how that works; you’re going to hell anyway – and that’s really juvenile motivation given to such wicked characters, that’s quickly swept away. Basically, what I’m saying is Blink Twice presents a really crass event really crassly, and there’s no forgiving that. Is the movie also trying to set up a prequel where we see how Frida first came to the island? And why she was sent home? Blink Twice: Year One – soon coming to a cinema near you! I would be interested to find out how Slater refers to Frida as his “best friend”, since her limited backstory would categorize her as a “nothing” like Lucas, and Slater hates that, but I can’t trust any prequel these days to be satisfactory.
Also, I have to talk about the trigger warning at the beginning of this movie, that clearly states that this movie is going to be about sexual violence – which is fine and reasonable, I don’t mind the trigger warning. But when your movie is a mystery, where it’s only the third act that reveals the abuse, then the suspense is pointless, since you’ve already spoiled your movie. I think you either have to trust that your movie can stand on its own, be shocking and provoking in the right manner, or you need to change your movie. I’m sure there is a way to depict sexual assault without it being so revolting, or at least not as provocative as the sharp glimpses we see here. (I praise Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) for depicting a sexual assault in Black Mask’s bar, without showing the actress being humiliated in the process). I think you either have to trust your audience’s maturity, or be kinder to their sensitivities. Putting a warning up front is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Putting a warning up front, to me, just doesn’t cut the mustard. But I also get it – you make a movie about something horrific, and you want to be respectful to those who have suffered it; that’s kind. I’ve experienced a movie like Wind River, where the nature of the investigation comes out of nowhere, builds rapidly, and is effective for the movie, but I saw a woman have to leave the theatre in a sudden. I, myself, have not experienced sexual assault, but I have experienced how a movie like this can cause distress.
Blink Twice also does make Don’t Worry Darling look slightly worse by comparison, but they’re basically the same movie in so many ways. Instead of the women being dazed and confused inside a… video game?… now they’re on an island. Instead of Olivia Wilde’s character saying she’s happy playing along, we’ve got Gina Davis wishing to not remember. Instead of Jemma Chan’s character in Don’t Worry Darling planning on beating the evil men at their own game, we have Frida as the new “Mrs. King”, as if that title is not on the nose 🙄 Me, being like I do, I do wonder if this movie could’ve been improved by a change in tactic. That, at a point where we’re satisfied that the ladies are losing days and not remembering, we switch to the men’s side to see how they conduct their operation. Get Out sort’ve kind’ve did this, when they showed us the auction scene, and how the white elitists where parceling their victims. And this way, by the time the third act rolls around, and Frida and Sarah are sitting at the dinner table, clearly acting differently, and we’re wondering if Slater is going to sniff it out, we’d have a proper insight into how Slater goes about thinking, making the cat-and-mouse game intensify. But the movie doesn’t want to do that – because Blink Twice wants to be about crushed femininity, and so the female protagonists must always be in the driver’s seat. It’s a shame, because when the action is at its highest in the third act, the movie still has to play catch-up, filling us in with what the hell has been going on. Instead, think of a movie like The Menu, where Fiennes and Taylor-Joy’s characters share perspective throughout the movie, and so by the time their final battle of wits is upon us, there is nothing else to focus on but that, and it is very satisfying 😋 Blink Twice, not only has to parlay the girls trying to escape, with Slater’s insight, but also further twists, like how Frida has been to the island before. And wouldn’t it have been better if the latter was given space to land alone?
Ultimately, you can’t sacrifice story for message. I can’t accept slippery execution for defiance. Feminine plights and abuses are real, but if you overexaggerate fragility, then those movies just leave me cold. Promising Young Woman, or even something like this year’s Challengers, capture a strong feminine perspective while accounting for agency, and I think these are examples of the good. Men is a really great movie too, that wants to waggle its finger at men’s sordid behaviours, but also holds an insight. I had to laugh when these girls start to suspect something – Sarah thinks if Jessica were real, then she would remember her, but concedes something strange is going on somewhere. Then Frida then tells her to drink what is snake venom, and she just says, “fuck it”… because, why, women be so crazy trusting they just daffy like that? 🥴 In a lot of ways, this movie is just a story about how girls are dumb. They’ll drink anything (Frida and Sarah have little problem convincing the others to drink disgusting shots poolside), and they’ll uproot their whole existence for boys who promise a good time, which the girls acknowledge is ridiculous by their own admission. But they also get taken advantage of, and that’s bad too. And that is bad too.
2.5
P.S. Why is Tom (Haley Joel Osment) eating eggs?! He says it’s to lose weight so people will fuck him, but then he has sex on a string 💁♂️ This movie is unintentionally hilarious.
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