Arts & Culture

Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 102 mins.
When: Fri., Aug. 23
Genre: Thriller
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Interesting directorial debut from actor Zoë Kravitz, though it ultimately fizzles.

IT’S BEEN OBSERVED by many critics that the world of cinema is getting more, well, algorithmic. There’s a feeling that more and more films (or content, as the executives would say) are being created through a careful assemblage of social media keywords and plot points from other films. Two of the titles that have made the greatest impression in the era of “content,” Get Out and Parasite, feel like they’ve been an overwhelmingly transparent template for both film and television. The reason being they were successful “ideological” thrillers, films that were genuinely entertaining while having an insightful metaphor about political issues.

Blink Twice, the directorial debut of actor Zoë Kravitz, feels in the algorithmic shadow of those films. It employs a similar setup, a working-class outsider entering a sinister rich home, to then reveal greater dynamics about the world today through genre mechanics. Certainly, this film wears issues of gender, race and class on its sleeve, but it feels underdeveloped as both a statement and thriller, perhaps because there’s ultimately no real sense of surprise or metaphor.

The opening scene sees our heroine, Frida (Naomi Ackle), as her eyes dart over an overstimulating Instagram feed, the film quick to establish a motif of vision and subjectivity. Particularly catching her attention is a post by Slater King (Kravitz’s real-life fiancé Channing Tatum), a Silicon Valley CEO who seems to be on an endless “I’ve been learning and growing” social media apology tour for an unspecified public transgression.

By a stroke of luck (the film is a sinister variation on a fairy tale after all), Frida gets to run into Slater in person. Their meet-cute is orchestrated by the fact that she’s a server at a fancy event where he’s speaking, setting up a power dynamic he’s quick to jump on and exploit. She — alongside four other women — is soon invited to a private island he’s just purchased. They’re introduced to his entourage of fellow rich white men, played by the talented likes of Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan, Simon Rex and Haley Joel Osment. As one can deduce from even the trailer, Jeffrey Epstein-like activities may be afoot, out of which the film still tries to wring suspense even if it seems the obvious destination.

Tatum, in a rare villain performance, is compelling, but it doesn’t help matters that he’s so outwardly coded as bad from the beginning that there’s no real chance of being tricked into finding him charming. This points to the ostensible problem: Everything feels like a bit of a foregone conclusion and, thus, results in a pretty dull film, no matter how hard it tries to ramp up the tension with jarring sound design and freak-out imagery (though one sequence that approaches the awful implied sexual violence more head on is effectively chilling). Kravitz’s filmmaking is solid enough for a first-timer, but there comes a point where all her stabs at Stanley Kubrick-like symmetry begin to feel more like “design” than direction — compensation for a lack of actual substance.

It’s refreshing on one end that the film doesn’t spend too long with setup, but the characters do feel underdeveloped and more like symbols than people. Kravitz’s ideas about trauma and power dynamics throughout the film don’t quite cohere, likely because it’s piling a lot of signifiers and buzzwords on top of each other more than expanding on its baseline ideas or setting. After all, a film doesn’t always need to present game-changing answers to society’s ills, but it’s refreshing when it can at least pose some interesting questions.