Zoë Kravitz comes out swinging for her directorial debut Blink Twice, a snarling revenge thriller that — not unlike the actor's incarnation of Catwoman — takes aim at the world of ultra rich, blithely unrepentant white male privilege.
Departing from his regular hoofers and charmers, Channing Tatum (who is reportedly engaged to Kravitz) dons the 'evil Spock' goatee as Slater King, a billionaire playboy whose indiscretions have forced him to step down as CEO of his tech company. It's the kind of performative sabbatical designed to let a powerful man cool off, go to 'therapy' and return to the public eye unscathed.
The way that Tatum pulls on a vape alone is enough to traumatise any Magic Mike fan for life.
At a swank fundraising gala celebrating King's new-found enlightenment, two waitstaff — besties Frida (Naomi Ackie, I Wanna Dance With Somebody) and Jess (an amusingly nervy Alia Shawkat) — swap their service uniforms for co*cktail dresses and slip behind the velvet rope, where Frida catches the tech titan's wandering eye.
Before you can say "Welcome back, Jeffrey Epstein", the pair have been swept away in a private jet to King's very own tropical island, where every guest is required to check-in their phone upon arrival. It's all cerulean blue swimming pools, artisanal meals and MDMA-laced dancing — in other words, it seems too good to be true.
"So, do you think the human sacrifice is before or after dinner?" wonders Jess, as she and Frida sashay in cult-white robes. A clutch of other young women guests — including Survival-style reality TV actor Sarah (Hit Man's Adria Arjona) — seem similarly pleasantly bewildered.
An audience will immediately clock what's up, however: King is surrounded by a cadre of dudes whose linen suits might as well be sewn from red flags. Among them are the tech prince's skeevy right-hand man (Christian Slater), his personal chef (Simon Rex, Red Rocket), a banjo-playing Hollywood type (Haley Joel Osment) seething over his ex-wife, and King's mysterious therapist (Twin Peaks icon Kyle MacLachlan, who knows a thing or two about sinister inner sanctums).
And that's before we get to Geena Davis's barmy, Ghislaine-coded resort administrator, or the elderly, gnomic staffer (María Elena Olivares) whose sole job appears to be wrangling snakes and mumbling "red rabbit" like a bootleg Shining character.
Just your regular holiday vibe, then; nothing odd to see here at all.
It's easy to imagine that Kravitz, an LA child who grew up in the enclave of super-celebrity, might have seen the sordid side of the rich and powerful — and her rage is matched by her strange, sometimes very funny sense of detail.
There's a playfulness to the film's looming darkness — think deranged laughter and midnight runs in flowing robes — that evokes both danger and giddy abandon.
While it contains traces of recent one-percenter satires like Glass Onion and The White Lotus, Blink Twice reveals Kravitz to be a closer student of Jordan Peele and Quentin Tarantino — the former's Get Out and the latter's fondness for 70s exploitation cinema both casting long shadows here.
There are unusual camera angles, menacing stabs of music, and a keen attention to physicality — feet, nails, face-masks that recall tribal demons. (A moment involving a foot-tapping security guard and Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody captures the whole uneasy atmosphere to perfection.)
If only the movie's execution was as memorable as its ferocious, off-kilter energy.
Once Kravitz and her co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum (High Fidelity) begin to unravel their extremely bleak subject matter, the movie struggles to strike a balance between trauma and pulp — a high-wire act that very few filmmakers, let alone a first-time director, manage to pull off on a good day.
For a movie that involves memory-erasing perfume and tequila shots laced with snake venom, Blink Twice eventually reveals itself to be little more than it seems: a straight-up revenge piece whose cliches risk trivialising the grim material at its core. (The film's much better, if admittedly unmarketable, original title — puss* Island — betrays its origins in the #MeToo era.)
There's no real twist, just a gear-crunching turn for the obvious midway through the film.
A slow-motion hero-shot set to Beyoncé's I'm That Girl — all bloodied gowns and daggered stares — should be electrifying; instead, it plays like your new favourite music video of 2015.
That said, it's a film whose imagery and ideas, however unevenly they're delivered, aren't easy to dismiss.
In setting her sights exclusively on white men in power — and having her heroines be women of colour — Kravitz summons her nation's fraught legacy on race relations, while the movie's musings on memory speak to the way in which trauma is weaponised by abusers.
Kravitz's stranger, more unruly instincts might have gotten lost in a familiar tale of revenge, but Blink Twice is evidence of a filmmaker feeling out some prickly, powerful terrain.
Where she goes from here may well surprise us.
Blink Twice is in cinemas from August 22.
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