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James Mottram

4/5 stars
“Forgetting is a gift,” purrs Channing Tatum’s oily tech billionaire Slater King in actress Zoë Kravitz’s compelling directorial debut, Blink Twice.
The art of erasing ill deeds from your memory is at the heart of this disturbing, finely crafted thriller, a film that should have men quaking in their boots.
Wrapped up inside a thoroughly entertaining tale is a potent examination of the modern-day male-female dynamic that never feels preachy, as well as a look at power, exploitation and abuse.


Taking the lead is British actress Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody), who plays cocktail waitress Frida. When she and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) meet King at a fundraiser, they get sucked into his orbit as he invites them to join his crew to party in his luxury mansion on his private island.
When they get there, there are clothes laid out for them and the other women – Sarah (Adria Arjona), Carmilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen).
Around the table are King’s buddies, including Vic (Christian Slater), who has an incessant habit of snapping Polaroids of anyone and everyone, and entitled geeks Tom (Haley Joel Osment) and Lucas (Levon Hawke).

There’s also Cody (Red Rocket’s Simon Rex), who is in charge of supplying the delicious food before everyone starts dropping liquid MDMA on their tongues and getting super high. With Slater footing the bill, it all sounds idyllic. Until it is not.
Scripted by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, Blink Twice has an increasingly hallucinogenic quality as things unfold, but it never loses the plot. Well structured – the use of Jess’ yellow lighter as a totem is really clever – it is a film that keeps you guessing until everything drops neatly into place.
Then it becomes a matter of survival, something Arjona’s ex-reality-TV star repeatedly says she is capable of doing.

Tatum has already been on screens this year in Fly Me to the Moon and in his eye-catching cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine. But his role here far outstrips those appearances, his therapy-loving character feeling like the love child of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
Kravitz, his real-life fiancée, directs with intent, while Ackie revels in her role as the “invisible” woman who “ain’t nobody”, as the Chaka Khan song goes that memorably plays across one scene.
The final act is bloody, and might be too much for some, but there is a glee reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s oeuvre to the gore. It leaves the viewer both satisfied and with much to ponder.
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Disturbing, finely wrought and entertaining, actress’ compelling thriller has a gleefully bloody ending reminiscent of a Cronenberg film


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.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Disturbing, finely wrought and entertaining, actress’ compelling thriller has a gleefully bloody ending reminiscent of a Cronenberg film

Disturbing, finely wrought and entertaining, actress’ compelling thriller has a gleefully bloody ending reminiscent of a Cronenberg film