Blink Twice -- a review

Actress Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of musician/actor Lenny Kravitz, is best known for her roles in films like Mad Max Fury Road, Rough Night, and as a very memorable Catwoman in The Batman (she was superb in that film). She made her directorial debut (as well as co-written the script and co-produced) with Blink Twice (Amazon/MGM), a psychological thriller about a cocktail waitress named Frida (Naomi Ackie) who’s busy working an exclusive event with her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) when the guy who’s running it, billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites them to party with him on his private island for a few days.

Of course, the women take him up on his offer, looking forward to treating themselves to a wonderful vacation on a tropical island. However, Frida quickly notices some strange things happening, like one of the maids, who keeps laughingly referring to her as “red rabbit.” Jess also realizes that she’s suffering from memory lapses. But most of this is passed off as being a side affect of the potent hallucinogens, aka party favors, that have all been provided freely by their host. But shortly after being bitten by a snake, Frida begins to experience some true terror.

Blink Twice is a bit predictable. Of course there’s going to be something ominously wrong once they reach the island; that’s practically telegraphed from the beginning. But Kravitz still does a good job at keeping the story moving. And Naomi Ackie is superb in making her Frida very sympathetic to the point where you care about what happens to her. Christian Slater (Heathers), Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), and Gina Davis (A League of Their Own) round out the strong supporting cast of King’s lackeys who are all along for the party (and the conspiracy).

And even when Frida discovers the dark truth and begins fighting for her life, Kravitz still manages to keep all of this extremely gripping, creating loads of suspense within every shot that leaves the viewer wondering what will happen next. All of this leads up to a surprising, but immensely satisfying, twist at the end. Blink Twice tries to make some salient points about class warfare, but it really works much better when it sticks to being a stylish, black-hearted thriller that ultimately shows that everybody is just trying to survive in the hard-hearted jungle. --SF

Blink Twice is rated R, and has a trigger warning for scenes of sexual assault and hard violence. It's available on streaming, as well as on physical media.

Comments

The Running Men -- a review (of both)

The Running Man was another book written by Stephen King under the Richard Bachman name, like The Long Walk, which had also been released as a movie in the Fall of 2025. Like The Long Walk , The Running Man takes place in a dystopian future where the United States has become an authoritarian nightmare where the majority of the population is just barely struggling to survive. But there's a short cut to great wealth, and that's the Running Man, a reality TV show where contestants have to survive a crazed game where they must dodge trained killers who are sent out to get them. And if the contestants lose, they die. The Running Man was turned into a movie once before, back in 1987, directed by Paul Michael Glaser (who played Starsky on the 1970s cop show Starsky & Hutch). It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role as Ben Richards, a former police officer who has no choice but to join the show to stay alive after being framed. The '87 Running Man was...

The Housemaid

The Housemaid (from 2025—not to be confused with the 2010 film of the same name) is based on the first book in a psychological thriller series by author Freida McFadden. Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway. a young woman down on her luck who’s struggling after being released on parole from jail. While living in her car, Millie applies for a live-in maid position with a wealthy family, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) & Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) Winchester, and their young daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle) and—to her delight—she gets the job. But, of course, once Millie starts working her maid gig, that’s when the real horror show begins. Despite acting like she was in Millie’s corner in the beginning, Nina deliberately creates problems for Millie that make her look bad. It turns out that Nina is a whack-job who’s served time at a mental facility for trying to kill her own daughter when she was a baby, and now Nina’s got Millie in her sights. If The Housemaid sounds like some ...

The Conjuring: Last Rites

Whether you believe in the “true” exploits of demonologists Ed & Lorraine Warren or not (I don’t), The Conjuring series of films, based on their “true” stories, have all been very entertaining, with everything now supposedly coming to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites . After a prologue in 1964, where we witness the traumatic birth of the Warren’s daughter, Judy, the rest of the movie advances to 1986, with the Warrens now somewhat retired. They’re still speaking at colleges, before giggly students who crack Ghostbusters jokes at them, but the Warrens have ceased personally investigating creepy cases on their own. That is, until their good friend Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) winds up hanging from a noose, thanks to a demonic attack. Father Gordon had been trying to get the Warrens to investigate the case of the Smurls--a family in Pennsylvania who are suffering through a severe haunting in their house, and when the Warrens finally do get involved, the demons come...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog