Blink Twice (2024)

Zoë Kravitz arrives as a director with a private island, a billionaire in linen, and a cast assembled with visible care. Naomi Ackie carries the film as Frida, a cocktail waitress of considerable resourcefulness, surrounded by a notably diverse ensemble that reads as deliberate programming rather than accident. The premise is a familiar one: wealthy men behaving badly in a beautiful place, champagne flowing, phones confiscated, and something rotten under the hibiscus. Kravitz knows the genre well enough to let the dread accumulate before the ugliness arrives.

The engine here is gendered predation, and it runs hot. The film is a revenge fantasy built on recovered memory and female solidarity, a story in which women drink snake venom to remember what was done to them and then settle accounts with the men who did it. That is a thesis, and the film states it. Channing Tatum's tech mogul is the plutocrat as predator, his fortune and his island and his entitlement forming a single apparatus of exploitation. The eat-the-rich instinct is unmistakable, though the racial dimension of wealthy white men preying on everyone else stays submerged beneath the gender critique. It is there, but it is not the organizing principle.

Where the film lands is in the middle register of sermonizing. It has a point of view and it makes it, but mostly through stabbings and vape pens instead of speeches, which is the more tolerable delivery method. Critics split accordingly, some calling it a chop shop of buzzwords, others praising its restraint. There is no LGBTQ+ thread, no environmental conscience, no interest in body politics or neurodivergence, and no historical revisionism to speak of. What remains is a slick, competent thriller with a grievance, executed with enough craft to make the grievance go down. Kravitz has talent. The ledger is balanced.