'Blink Twice' Leads New Movie Debuts This Weekend

Thriller-horror-comedy Blink Twice is probably the front-runner among new movies entering theaters this week, but it will have a difficult time standing up to the competition from the movies already there. Last week's top movie, Alien: Romulus, and previous box-office leader Deadpool & Wolverine are likely to continue their dominance in a theater environment that favors sequels over original movies such as Blink Twice. Read on for details.

Via the LA Times.

In her daring directorial debut, “Blink Twice,” actor turned writer-director Zoë Kravitz doesn’t flinch once — not even when her film might be served by looking away. She maintains a steely gaze in this caustic social-horror fable, laced with black comedy, which has nods to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” while Kravitz chooses to aim her artistic weapons at sexual politics, not necessarily race. Co-written with E.T. Feigenbaum, “Blink Twice” is a big, bold swing, even if its message becomes muddled along the way. It’s clear Kravitz wants to make a statement with this film. What’s less clear is what exactly that statement might be.

“Blink Twice” opens with a dead-eyed scroll in a dingy bathroom; our protagonist, Frida (Naomi Ackie), thumbs her phone screen on the toilet catatonically, observing the lives of others on Instagram, before she and her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat) rush to work, serving champagne and canapés at a swanky gala hosted by a disgraced tech mogul, Slater King (Channing Tatum). Yearning to feel a part of something bigger, the cater waiters slip into slinky gowns and join the party themselves, warmly welcomed into the inner circle of wealthy men as beautiful young women typically are. Jet off to Slater’s private island with his pals? Frida’s been longing for a vacation.

Kravitz observes this moneyed milieu well, and what she capably achieves in “Blink Twice” is an absurdist comedy of gendered manners once the guys (Tatum, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Levon Hawke and Christian Slater) and gals (Ackie, Shawkat, Adria Arjona, Liz Caribel and Trew Mullen) touch down at Slater’s secluded spread located in a lush tropical forest. Outfitted in matching white bikinis and resort wear, the girls are plied with fine wine, exquisite food and good drugs. The setting and its accoutrements couldn’t be more more richly luxurious, but Kravitz presents this world with a sickening, unsettling hyperreality.

Everything feels off in “Blink Twice,” intentionally so. The style is quite jarring, with an abrasiveness that’s almost chafing to watch. The camera angles are strange and the flow is jagged, as Kravitz and editor Kathryn J. Schubert construct scenes with seconds and even minutes dropping out. The images created by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra are oversaturated, too bright, and have an almost burning lucidity and crispness; the sound design is also overly pronounced and too sharp. This postcard-perfect setting becomes almost unbearable to endure.

Of course something’s not right. It’s a terrible truth to realize that you can have all of the nice things and still be having a bad time. Jess eventually realizes it, after a spree of endless nights spent binging on fun-fun-fun, the girls racing around the lawn in a psychedelics-induced stupor after their stultifying dinners with the men. They have no phones, no one knows what day it is and mysterious injuries keep appearing. When Jess goes missing and no one seems to remember she was even there, it’s up to Frida to claw her way out of the fog and find out what happened to her best friend.

Kravitz nails the social analysis and a dark, satirical tone, but as the film becomes a horror thriller, her directorial execution falters.

Get the rest of the story at the LA Times.