There is a great deal going on in Zoë Kravitz’s ambitious, intermittently successful directorial debut. After 103 minutes of sunlight, drugs, high-style violence and (mostly) sublimated sexual desire, the viewer could be reasonably permitted a lie down in a dark room.
There is a Russian-doll effect here. The film is, to an extent, about the exhausting pressures that come from being told to have a good time. An impressively starry cast play visitors to a millionaire’s luxury island. The food is top-end. The drinks are lavish. Everyone is beautiful. But the lushness seems to bore them all. The film itself is trying just as hard to entertain the folk in the cinema. They too may end up longing for a tad less well-healed excess.
What we have here is The White Lotus by way of Get Out. Channing Tatum plays Slater King, a tech millionaire forced to issue an apology for some unspecified outrage. He will now step back from the business and retire to Luxury Island. In a rougher part of the world, Frida (the splendid Naomi Ackie) scrolls her phone while sitting on the lavatory, comes across video of King and entertains pipe dreams about hooking up. What do you know? The next day she is waitressing at a posh event when she runs into the magnate. He ends up inviting her to the island. She can hardly contain her enthusiasm.
One can hardly fault Kravitz for the extravagance of her casting. Kyle MacLachlan is here as Slater’s analyst. Geena Davis is chief organiser. Simon Rex and Christian Slater are on the staff. And so on. Frida initially has a pleasant enough time but, as the days drag on, she starts to suspect something is up. Why does the maid keep muttering cryptic warnings? Why are her own memories becoming jumbled?
Why are we getting condensation on our new triple-glazed windows?
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There are plainly gestures here towards the sinister doings of Jeffrey Epstein, but of only the vaguest and most non-committal style. You’d struggle to say Think Twice was a film about sexual abuse. It is certainly about the vacuousness of the billionaire lifestyle – all those satirically overworked descriptions of the cuisine – but there is nothing here you haven’t seen done more tartly in Triangle of Sadness or The Menu. The more it goes on the more muddled the disintegration becomes and the harder it proves to care.
A glossy package. Not quite enough inside.
Blink Twice opens in cinemas on Friday, August 23rd
