By Harry Gay
*Spoilers*
Conversations around sexual assault and gaslighting have become high visibility topics in the past few years with several high-profile cases of domestic and systemic abuse. It is within a post-#MeToo climate that films like Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, dip their toes into the miasma of various court cases, legal decisions, celebrity accusations and arguments over memory, consent and power clinging to the air in the last decade. The film attempts to waft its way through, sometimes successfully and other times not.
Blink Twice follows Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawcat), two working-class women invited to tech CEO Slater King’s (Channing Tatum) private island for a seemingly endless summer of debauchery and hedonism. What begins as frivolity soon turns to nightmare as the women on the island discover that they have been violently abused by their male comrades and made to forget these encounters through an amnesiac fluid hidden in their perfume. It is only through violent revenge that they are able to free themselves from their abusers’ clutches, but Frida’s decision to keep King alive as her slave in Blink Twice‘s denouement complicates what is a fairly tight revenge thriller.
