For her directorial debut, Blink Twice, actor and reluctantly labelled nepo baby Zoë Kravitz has arrived at the table with a plate that’s stacked precariously high. It’s a tart, topical thriller sat in a Venn diagram between the many recent “eat the rich” satires (a subgenre that’s taken us from the heady highs of Triangle of Sadness to the limp lows of Saltburn) and the post-Get Out #MeToo-inflected social thrillers (from the overrated Promising Young Woman to the underrated Fresh). It’s also about contemporary horror’s favourite buzzword, “trauma”, and also inspired by Jeffrey Epstein and his private island. It’s about misogyny and abuse and memory and materialism and gender performance and many other things that would be a spoiler to mention. It’s therefore less of a plate and more of a buffet, and while it might be beautifully served, it’s a film about excess that suffers from it too, a case of too much leaving us with too little.
It would be more tempting to praise Kravitz’s ambition as a writer-director (the script is co-written by her High Fidelity collaborator ET Feigenbaum) if the film didn’t feel so very, at times eye-rollingly, reminiscent of other recent films and if it didn’t arrive at what one hopes is the end of those aforementioned cycles. Like most attempts to repeat Jordan Peele’s lightning strike, it works best on the most base of terms, as a poppy and visually alluring date night thriller than it does as the finger-wagging dissertation it inevitably becomes.
