Zoë Kravitz's unflinching, darkly funny Blink Twice is the most affecting horror movie of the year

"So, everybody's dead," Channing Tatum's tech billionaire Slater King says with a grin in the trailer for Zoë Kravitz's bold, brilliant directorial debut Blink Twice. While the promo – set to LCD Soundsystem's upbeat 'Dance Yrself Clean' – keeps its cards close to its chest as to the how and why, with that three-word line, it makes it clear most of its characters aren't going to make it to the end credits alive, and yet I was still gobsmacked as just how much of a horror movie it truly is.

Billed as everything from a psychological thriller to a dark comedy, the film follows cocktail waitress and aspiring nail artist Frida (Naomi Ackie), who's been itching to cross paths with King again, having shared a brief flirtation with him while working his annual gala the year before. In an attempt to get his attention, she and her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat, on top, giggle-inducing form) swap their uniforms for silky dresses and infiltrate the party this time round – which leads to them to spend the evening with King and his fancy friends, before he whisks them all away to his private island.

At first, the vacation feels like a dream: private suites, pool days, and delicious multi-course dinners, followed by drug-fueled, dance-filled nights. Christian Slater's Vic gets irritable whenever he doesn't have an umbrellaed drink in-hand, Cody (Simon Rex) insists on calling Sarah (Adria Arjona) 'babe' despite her obvious disdain for the term, and everyone keeps stealing Jess's lighter, but who cares? 

The characters' joy is so infectious, you get swept up in it as a viewer. So much so, that the trip's more unsettling aspects, like the non-English speaking housekeeper who seems to recognize Frida, and the island's venomous snake problem, barely even register. When Jess suddenly disappears, Frida realizes she keeps losing huge chunks of time, and the film turns into a bloodsoaked nightmare, then, it completely knocks you for six. You mean to tell me that's what's been going on?!

Menacing Mike

It seems a little glib to say, but Blink Twice sees Kravitz weaponize her real-life fiancé Tatum's natural charm to devastating effect. The movie opens with Frida watching a video of King apologizing for his behavior, as he confirms he's stepped down as CEO from his company KingTech – though what he did exactly is never divulged. Even so, that's all we need to know to assume he's probably Not a Good Dude, but much like Frida, we kind of forget about all that once he starts showering her with champagne, asking how she got the scar on her temple with caring curiosity, and making her laugh as they play kiss-chase on the lawn. It turns out, though, he's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

"I wanted Slater King to be somebody that the audience felt comfortable and safe with, whilst also ensuring it would make sense that Frida would want to drop everything and leave with him," Kravitz recently told Zavvi. "If you're going to leave with a stranger, you have to make that connection feel real, so the audience never questions why."

"[We] talked about lots of different versions of Slater," Tatum said at the LA premiere (via MSN). "The one thing that we both agreed upon is that we didn't want to do the very stereotypical movie moment in a thriller where you reveal the bad guy."

The last part seems crucial in achieving Kravitz's vision here. King isn't a supervillain per se, but he's a man with immense wealth and power, and, well, what happens when all that goes to someone's head and twists their morality into something sinister.

Kravitz, who co-wrote the script with E.T. Feigenbaum, does similarly clever work with some of the supporting characters, too, like Geena Davis's bumbling assistant Stacey and Levon Hawke's crypto whizzkid Lucas, who seem to represent those who witness, or even facilitate, gross abuses of power, through generational and gender-specific lenses.

Reality bites

So why did this film – one that admittedly made me chuckle and want to hop on Booking.com at the earliest possible convenience – leave me so shell-shocked? I'm a horror-loving gorehound who barely flinches at most things these days. But it's because Kravitz injects so many small, toe-curlingly relatable moments in amongst the magical realism. We're not dealing with demons, killer clowns, or sharks here, we're faced with evils that are terrifyingly human. Even when I've seen a genre movie in the cinema late at night, I walk the 30 minutes from the train station home; I'm pretty certain there are no ghosts and ghoulies lurking around Maidstone. After Blink Twice? I got a cab.

"I felt like there was a lot more that needed to be discussed, but there wasn't really a place to say these things, and it didn't feel safe to say them out loud," Kravitz told the San Francisco Chronicle, as she remembered starting to write the script back in 2017, as the #MeToo movement looked to be simmering down. "So I started writing because I wanted to express these feelings and thoughts and because I wanted to try and highlight the absurdity of what society asks or expects of women."

Clearly inspired by what used to go on on Jeffrey Epstein's Epstein Island, and other horrific true events, Kravitz has conjured up something that achieves the perfect balance between entertaining thrills and uncompromising, rageful message, which is no mean feat nowadays. Forgetting may be a "gift", as King suggests towards the end of Blink Twice, but I won't be shaking this one off any time soon.

Blink Twice is in cinemas now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.