Blink Twice: Despite its air of déjà vu, a captivating feminist fable (review)

A little too overwhelmed by its references, from Get Out to Midsommar, the first film directed by the actress of The Batman still has style.

By a twist of fate, two girlfriends (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat), who work as waitresses at high-society galas, find themselves invited to the private island of a tech mogul (Channing Tatum), along with a handful of wealthy partygoers. The two young women can’t believe their luck: the island is heavenly, the food delicious, the billionaire adorable, his friends very welcoming, the champagne flows freely and the joints get bigger every day. Little by little, however, the temporal markers begin to blur, the atmosphere becomes more and more cottony…

It’s going to go wrong, something is going to go wrong, we can sense it. We even know it. Already because we read the newspapers and the falsely heavenly autarkic hedonism staged by actress Zoë Kravitz (Mad Max: Fury Road, Big Little Lies, Kimi…) in her first film as a director, she evokes the Jeffrey Epstein affair right from the wording of her pitch – she evoked it even more when her title was the much more blunt and provocative one Pussy Island (“Cat Island”). If we guess that a twist awaits us and that the dream risks turning into a nightmare, it is also because we have been to the cinema in recent years and we have seen Get Out, Midsommar, Don’t Worry Darlingthe whole wave of folk horror put through the chic mill of the A24 studio, but also stories of feminist revenge, of Promising Young Woman has Assassination Nationnot to mention satires about the ultra-rich lost in their bad island trips, such as Glass Onion Or The White Lotus.

Blink Twice does not come out of nowhere, and could suffer from appearing in the tail of a comet that began its course somewhere around 2017, at the time of the beginnings of the #MeToo movement and the triumph of Get Out. But despite the overdose of references, despite this big feeling of déjà vu, despite even the numerous script inflections that are forced through (difficult to detail here without major spoilers), the film grabs the viewer, with its very assumed music video seduction (beautiful flashy and hard-hitting photography by Adam Newport-Berra, who notably worked on Euphoria) and the furious energy of the metaphor spun by Zoë Kravitz around trauma, memory, forgetting, forgiveness, and the crocodile tears shed by certain predators during fake media repentances. It is less the revelations and twists that count here than the playful way in which Zoë Kravitz arranges the pieces of the puzzle (the haunting close-ups on the faces of her actors that she clearly adores, the accumulation of bad omens, the exciting musical spotting) in a climate that is ultimately quite captivating of voluptuousness, threat and anger.

By Zoë Kravitz. With Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Alia Shawkat… Duration: 1h42 In theaters August 21.