Starring: Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Adria Arjona, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 102 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Cocktail waitress Frida is invited to join tech billionaire Slater King and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. As strange things start to happen, Frida questions her reality.
We, the audience, are invited, whether we like it or not, to take a trip to a Fantasy Island – a horror Fantasy Island. This is a first film co-written and directed by Kravitz. She has invested a great deal of imagination and ingenuity to creating it. It is very much a film of the #MeToo consciousness of the past 20 years or so. And, it brings to mind the criminal behaviour of predator, Jeffrey Epstein, and judgments on him and his behaviour.
But, it doesn’t quite start that way. We are introduced to function cocktail waitress, Frida (Ackie) rapt in photos on her phone, idolising the guest of honour, Slater King (Tatum in what eventually becomes a demanding role). The function is in honour of King, who regrets his behaviour in his business career, and is now a champion of philanthropy.
With his charm, Frida and her roommate, Jess, find themselves, as the audience does, on a plane to Slater’s island. For the next half hour, the guests, half a dozen young women, with some men friends on the island, have what they call a good time, no, ‘great time’, eating, drinking, gourmet food and alcohol, lazing by the pool, for days on end, losing a sense of time… (Audiences who would envy such a great time, they will enjoy this hedonistic holiday; those for whom there is more in life than idling it away, it seems a very long time before anything really happens.)
Obviously, there is a danger of spoilers when the action gets going. Perhaps best to say that a key issue is the role of memory. Is it important to go back into the past to remember, to help with explanations of events in life? Or is it better to let the memories go and to move into the future? And so, with this shift in the drama, some of the guests remembering, disturbed by memories, decide to go into action to save themselves and others… Which means then that the great time turns into something of a messy time and mayhem.
Blink Twice has a strong supporting cast including Shawket and Arjona as two of the young women, Slater and Osment as two of the guests, MacLachlan as a psychiatrist and Davis as something of the housekeeper of the island.
As might be expected, there is a challenging ending – and the audience having to go away to reflect on the #MeToo implications of what they have just seen.
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