“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” somebody once famously said in the movies. It made utterly no sense in 1970, but even less so now. In recent decades, the apology has become all the rage.
So at the beginning of Zoë Kravitz’s “Blink Twice,” when her tech-mogul protagonist, Slater King, sits on a TV couch and says “I’m sorry” for some unexplained transgression, well, it’s a familiar scene. Pick your offender, pick your year: Famous person issues ritual apology, gets off grid for a bit (in this case, a remote island with chickens) and returns, presumably forgiven. We’ve seen it all before.
Not that it isn’t fun to watch here — especially because Channing Tatum is so delightfully, charmingly smarmy in the role. “Blink Twice” is a big swing for him as an actor and even a bigger one for Kravitz, his life partner, as director and co-writer of this stylish, ambitious, buzzy film that seems to aspire to be a gender-themed “Get Out,” or a #MeToo-era thriller with echoes of “Promising Young Woman.”
And Kravitz almost pulls it off. With the help of a terrific cast, she offers strikingly confident, brashly entertaining filmmaking, until everything seems to break down in a mess of porous storytelling. It’s not the sudden intrusion of gore that’s the issue — this is a horror film, duh. It’s the sudden departure of logic. Perhaps you won’t be able to turn away — but, unlike in Jordan Peele’s or Emerald Fennell’s above-mentioned films, you won’t necessarily be able to explain what you saw, either.
But it sure is crackling fun, until it isn’t — which is a pretty apt way to describe the experience that Frida (Naomi Ackie, excellent) has. A cocktail waitress who designs nail art, Frida lives in a rundown apartment with roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat). When the two get a waitressing gig at a fundraiser, they cleverly plot to change into slinky dresses midway so they can mingle with wealthy guests.
Turns out, it’s a fundraiser for Slater’s firm, and when Frida trips, it’s the billionaire himself who helps her up. He introduces her to his friends, and soon, Frida and Jess can’t believe their luck — they’re on Slater’s plane, en route to his very own Fantasy Island.
The water is sparkling. The champagne is, too. Frida and Jess’ closets are filled with resort wear in stylish white, matching those given the other female guests: the flaky and/or stoned Camilla and Heather, and hard-nosed, sharp-elbowed Sarah, who has eyes on Slater and thus daggers out for Frida. (Adria Arjona’s Sarah is easily the most compelling performance of the movie.)
The food, prepared by Slater’s buddy Cody (Simon Rex), is impeccable. (His other pals are played by Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke, and his therapist by Kyle MacLachlan.) Alcohol is plentiful, sheets are soft, and there’s drugs, too — to be used “with intention,” according to Slater, whatever that means. Days are long, nights are longer, and soon nobody knows what day it is anyway.
But why is that, exactly? Well, all phones were confiscated upon arrival by Stacy, Slater’s ditzy assistant — Geena Davis, a hoot but somewhat underused (and one should never underuse Geena Davis). But something deeper seems at play. We’re trying to avoid spoilers, but as Jess tells Frida, “There is something wrong with this place.”
That would be easy enough to figure out just by looking at the oddly terrifying faces of the resort workers (shades of “Get Out”) who are surely hiding something. Also: why does Frida have dirt under her fingernails? And what happened to a red stain on her dress? Weird stuff is happening.
But Frida, still, is angry that Jess is balking. They’re on a gorgeous island, and someone important is courting her. “For the first time in my life I’m here and I’m not invisible, so please,” she admonishes her friend.
And so the pretense continues — that pretense, familiar in the Instagram era, of always having a good time. “Are you having a good time?” Slater asks more than once. “Yes!” says Frida, less convincingly as time goes on.
And when everything has gone to utter bloody, gory chaos, someone still suggests, eerily: “There’s a version of this where we’re all having a good time.”
There’s a deeper undercurrent here. Women, Kravitz has posited, are always expected to smile, play the game, pretend they’re having a good time — and, she says, to “forget” the bad stuff. And so forgetting is a prominent element in her film, one we won’t spoil.
In any case, there’s indeed a version of Kravitz’s film in which we’re all having a great time — most of it, actually. She just needs to stick the landing. We’ll all be eager to see what comes next.
“Blink Twice,” an Amazon/MGM release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references.” Running time: 103 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
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