This review contains major spoilers.
Blink Twice (2024) is one of those films where I could feel the director enjoying how much control she had over me. Zoë Kravitz’s feature debut is stylish, funny, uncomfortable, and horrific enough to make its private-island paradise into an Epstein-coded nightmare.
Frida (Naomi Ackie) works as a cocktail waitress but dreams of entering the world occupied by tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). When she and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) sneak into one of Slater’s fundraising events, Frida catches his attention. Before long, they are both invited to join him and his wealthy friends on his private island.
The island initially appears to offer everything Frida wants. There is expensive food, endless alcohol, beautiful clothing, and the possibility of intimacy with a man she admires. Time dissolves as one party blends into another. That loss of time feels pleasurable at first. Nobody knows what day it is because nobody has any responsibilities.
Kravitz gradually makes that same timelessness frightening. Conversations repeat. Frida wakes up without remembering how the previous night ended. Small injuries appear without explanation. Jess becomes increasingly alarmed, only to disappear while everyone else insists she was never there.
The gradual revelation is easily the strongest narrative element in Blink Twice. Kravitz understands that suspense doesn’t always require darkness. Much of the film is brightly lit, colorful, and almost aggressively beautiful. The horror comes from the growing suspicion that pleasure itself has become part of the trap. Like the house in my analysis of Heretic, the island creates the appearance of freedom while ensuring that every available choice keeps its victims inside a system designed by one man. At the same time, the film makes a not-so-subtle comparison to the headlines of its time, where disgustingly wealthy people try to make things bright and sunny for us rubes, while they sneak away to Jeffrey Epstein’s Island to kidnap, rape, and torture people (particularly young women and girls) for pleasure.
Setting aside the real-world connections for a moment, the film’s dark comedy helps maintain the uncertainty of what’s really happening for as long as possible. Slater’s guests are ridiculous enough that the film can briefly resemble a satire of wealthy people congratulating themselves for being enlightened. The women receive identical clothes. The men lounge around eating elaborate meals and talking about therapy. Slater has publicly apologized for some vaguely defined misconduct and now presents himself as a changed man because he went away, reflected, and learned how to use the correct language.
That public rehabilitation becomes more disturbing once we understand what is happening on the island. Slater has not changed. He has simply learned how to control the narrative surrounding him.
The perfume given to the women contains a substance that erases their memories. Each night, Slater and his friends sexually assault them. By morning, the women remember another wonderful party. Snake venom restores their memories, revealing that Frida has not merely been victimized during the current trip. She was brought to the island before, assaulted, injured, and made to forget the entire experience.
Memory in Blink Twice is therefore more than a convenient thriller device. It is the mechanism through which patriarchal power protects itself. Slater does not only control what happens to the women’s bodies. He controls whether their experiences can become part of a shared reality.
If the women cannot remember what happened, they cannot accuse anyone. They cannot warn one another, recognize patterns, or even understand their own fear. Their confusion makes them appear irrational, while the men retain the authority to explain what is “really” happening. Abuse becomes easier to repeat because every morning produces a new version of the victim who lacks the knowledge required to resist.
The idea fits comfortably within the tradition of political horror built around social paranoia. Frida knows something is wrong long before she can prove it. Her inability to identify the threat does not mean the threat is imaginary. It means the people responsible have constructed an environment in which her own perception cannot be trusted. It all sounds so painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
Naomi Ackie carries this progression beautifully. Frida begins the film eager to be noticed by Slater, and Ackie allows us to understand that desire without making her look foolish. Frida is attracted not only to him, but to the possibility of becoming someone important inside his world. Her excitement gradually gives way to embarrassment, suspicion, terror, and finally rage.
The ensemble also deserves credit for making the island feel both inviting and deeply strange. Everyone behaves as though they are having the greatest time of their lives, but their enthusiasm always feels slightly over-rehearsed. Adria Arjona is particularly effective as Sarah, whose apparent rivalry with Frida gives way to cooperation once they recover their memories. The film recognizes how easily women can be encouraged to compete with one another while the men surrounding them remain protected by their solidarity.
Frida and Sarah survive only after they stop treating each other as rivals and identify the structure working against both of them. The men have been allowed to act collectively from the beginning. They share access, secrets, and protection. The women have to reconstruct that same solidarity while recovering memories of their own abuse.
In this respect, Blink Twice approaches the problem of autonomy differently from Obsession. In that film, one man overrides a woman’s identity to obtain the relationship he wants. Slater’s operation is larger and more systematic. He turns the removal of female autonomy into a social ritual shared by an entire circle of men.
The film is not especially subtle about any of this. Once the truth emerges, nearly every image and line of dialogue snaps into place with little room for ambiguity. The perfume, snakes, red rabbit, missing friend, identical clothing, and fragmented memories all belong to the same explanatory system. The revelation is satisfying, but the film occasionally seems worried that someone might miss its point.
Still, that lack of subtlety is a relatively minor problem because Kravitz delivers the revelation with so much energy. The eruption of violence is horrifying, cathartic, and sometimes very funny. Christian Slater’s death, in particular, turns a moment of revenge into a wonderfully nasty piece of physical comedy without completely breaking the tension.
I was less convinced by the final scene. Frida secretly puts the memory-erasing substance into Slater’s vape, reducing him to the same state of confusion he imposed on his victims. Instead of leaving him to die when the compound catches fire, she rescues him. We then discover that she has married him, taken control of his company, and now manages both his public identity and his damaged memory. All the clever storytelling is reduced to a basic Girl Boss revenge finale.
This reversal could have been far more interesting. Slater remains alive, but he has lost control of his mind, fortune, and narrative. Frida has transformed the weapon used against her into a means of acquiring power. The ending itself just wasn’t my cup of tea, perhaps because the reality is so much less enjoyable for survivors of abuse. Those who survived Epstein’s Island didn’t get to reverse roles and become the wealthy, all-powerful arbiters of truth. Instead, they were maligned in the press and had their abusers protected by the system. Perhaps the ending is catharsis for those who need it most, but for me personally, it felt like shallow wish-fulfillment.
Kravitz has described the film as being about power rather than empowerment in an interview with Vanity Fair, but I don’t think that distinction is reflected in the ending. The leap from escaping the island to marrying Slater and becoming CEO feels far too convenient. The film spends most of its runtime showing that patriarchal power is maintained by networks of wealth, friendship, reputation, and institutional complicity. The ending then suggests that Frida can take possession of that entire network simply by controlling its figurehead.
It also leaves Sarah and the other victims behind. Their collective resistance makes survival possible, but Frida’s private acquisition of Slater’s power becomes the final image. The conclusion wants to complicate the difference between justice and domination, yet it moves so quickly that the moral problem feels more like a stylish twist than a fully developed consequence.
Even with that reservation, Blink Twice is an impressive debut. Kravitz controls the film’s atmosphere, comedy, and escalating dread with confidence. Ackie gives the story an emotional center, while the ensemble makes the island feel like a party where everyone is following rules that Frida has not yet been allowed to remember.
The film may spell out its commentary too clearly, and its final reversal weakens an otherwise satisfying climax. Those are minor issues in a thriller that understands something genuinely frightening: power does not merely depend on silencing victims. Sometimes it depends on making them forget they were ever silenced.
Blink Twice (2024) Film Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
If you’d like to watch Blink Twice (2024), it’s currently available via Amazon.