Blink Twice by Zoë Kravitz is a stylish but strained thriller

Naomi Ackie brings a graceful, inquisitive presence to her character in Blink Twice. Photo / Carlos Somonte/Amazon MGM Studios

Without giving away too much, the act of forgetting serves as a major plot pivot in Blink Twice. Ironically, that’s what Zoë Kravitz’s debut as a writer-director requires of an audience. Just don’t remember that you’ve seen Get Out, Midsommar, Don’t Worry Darling, Promising Young Woman and/or Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and you should be fine.

True, there seem to be few original ideas left and none whatsoever in Hollywood, and true, worn-out plots can be made to seem brand new with enough style and smarts. And Blink Twice certainly has style. What it doesn’t have is a lick of sense.

As is often the case with movies directed by actors (Kravitz has been in everything from TV’s Big Little Lies to 2022′s The Batman), the casting is rich and the players enjoyably indulged. The British actor Naomi Ackie (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody) stars as Frida, a cocktail waitress with ambition, too much debt and a crummy apartment shared with wisecracking best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat). Working a tech gala, she catches the eye of billionaire wonder boy Slater King (Channing Tatum) – imagine if Elon Musk were actually as hot as he thinks he is – and, to her delight, finds herself and Jess invited to Slater’s private tropical island to party with his entourage.

Channing Tatum stars as Slater King. Photo: Zachary Greenwood/Amazon MGM Studios

The early scenes on the island are the film’s best: sly and sharp, with just enough razzmatazz direction and some fun subterranean mind games among the characters. Along with Frida and Jess, Slater has invited hangers-on Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen), the former fairly stupid and the latter extremely stoned. (Mullen is very funny but wasted in every sense of the word.)

There’s also Sarah (Adria Arjona), a steely reality-TV survivor – she won a season of Hot Survivor Babes – who has designs on the host and her claws out for rivals. Since Frida has been looking at Slater with cartoon hearts for eyes since the opening scene, the two women are immediately embroiled in a catty sublimated power struggle.

If all this sounds awfully retrograde, Slater’s guy pals aren’t much better. They’re a backslapping bunch of beta males played by actors doing clever variations on sleaze: Simon Rex (the porn-star star of Red Rocket); smiling, cynical Christian Slater; Levon Hawke (Ethan’s son) as a callow tech-lord wannabe; and Haley Joel Osment, the former Sixth Sense star who has grown up to resemble the world’s most dissolute Ewok. They all understand the assignment – sybaritic good times with an undercurrent of menace – and convey it with brio.

Tatum, the director’s real-life partner, conveys a surprising sensitivity and shyness as the top dog, behind which we catch faint glints of something more calculating – it’s a subtly layered performance that deserves a better movie. By contrast, Geena Davis flails as Slater’s hapless sister/majordomo, an underwritten part that deserves no movie at all.

So what’s really going down on Slater King’s hideaway island? Blink Twice, which was originally titled Pussy Island until Kravitz, uh, blinked, plants clues, rumbles a few storm clouds, and sends Frida into forbidden cabins and cabinets to piece together … but I can say no more. Suffice to say that the revelations cast a damper on the good times and turn the sun-splashed party into an endless bummer.

Kravitz, who wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum (TV’s High Fidelity), has things to say about men’s gaslighting and abuse of women and about how performative acts of contrition – Slater has publicly apologised for earlier bad behaviour – don’t mean much when you’re one of Earth’s richest humans. But the message in, say, Get Out was yoked to an airtight story structure, whereas Blink Twice becomes less believable as it goes.

The back end of Blink Twice is standard thriller territory, but it’s enlivened by the sudden camaraderie of Frida and Sarah, the smartest two people on the island as well as the most endangered. Ackie has a graceful, inquisitive presence, and her character has been written with interesting shades of insecurity and greed. It’s not her fault that Arjona, of TV’s Andor and Richard Linklater’s terrific Hit Man, has the kind of natural star charisma that blows away everyone else on-screen.

The director keeps it moving fast enough that you may not notice the yawning plot holes and improbabilities – I can’t specify without spoiling – until the drive home, at which point so many questions may have presented themselves that you have to pull over and count things up on your fingers. Blink Twice also requires some of its characters to lose more memories than seems physically or psychically possible, and there’s a final double twist that pushes the movie even farther out onto the ledge of implausibility.

In sum, the movie’s a passable time-waster, but it might be better – for Kravitz’s film-making future and for us – if we just forgot the whole thing.

Two stars. Rated R. At cinemas. Contains strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use, language throughout and some sexual references. 102 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.