One of the most skillful aspects of Blink Twice, the feature directorial debut of actress Zoë Kravitz, is the way it weaves in the sense of unarticulated dread that the movie’s Get Out-ish story depends on. Anyone with any inkling of the movie’s genre will know that besties Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) probably aren’t going to just have the time of their lives when they’re invited to the private-island partying sanctuary of semi-disgraced billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). But the way that Kravitz uses editing and cinematography to tease a subtle sense of disorientation out of the seemingly endless montages of sun, swimming, drugs, opulent meals, and playful flirtations doesn’t just cue the audience to expect a terrible revelation; it puts viewers in the middle of the revelry alongside Frida, Jess, and the other women partying alongside Slater and his pals, the repetitive becoming both rhythmic and numbing. The passage of time within the movie becomes just as nebulous as it is for the characters; when montages seem repetitive and overlong – OK, we get it, they’re smoking and swimming! – the deadening feeling has purpose, blurring the action together, leaving Frida both locked into the groove of routine, and unsettled by that new normal.
What happens, then, when Kravitz must move the story along and break that spell? The mechanics are clever enough, with a touch of Greek myth: The island has a flower, incorporated into the food and the endless supply of gift-bag perfume, that represses memories and leaves those who ingest it feeling a kind of perpetual ignorance-as-bliss (shades of the lotus, in other words). Frida realizes that a particular snake venom counteracts the effects of the flower, which is why Jess started to regain her memory and her desire to leave the island after a snake bite – and subsequently disappeared. The flower’s effects also explain why the other girls didn’t even remember Jess’s presence there. But Frida ingests the venom and tricks the other women into taking it too, gradually restoring everyone’s memories of what’s been really going on.
Frida, having taken the venom earlier, remembers more and faster. Specifically, she recalls what happened to Jess, getting a flash of memory of Slater snapping her neck. The fuller picture is just as horrifying: Every night after dinner, King and his crew make a game of chasing the women, tying them up, taking turns raping them, then using the flower to assure that they won’t remember the next day – basically, an exotic and elaborate rich-guy version of a date-rape drug. This is fully revealed in a long pan over the landscape, catching various women in state of terror and assault. As more of the women regain their memories, the slow terror of their pliant dancing with the men turns to rage as they turn against their captors/violators. After a series of chases and skirmishes, many of the men and some of the women are dead.
Blink Twice Ending Explained: So What’s The Twist?
Well, Frida makes one more discovery: She has been on the island before. When Frida met Slater earlier in the movie, she was under the impression that they’d met once before, only briefly, piquing her interest in this handsome, famous man. But that encounter actually progressed into him bringing her to the island for an extended period a year earlier, where she went through a similar experience: drugged, assaulted, and only remembering bits and pieces of it now. Thematically, this makes sense. The movie is explicitly about a repression response to trauma: The idea that “forgetting is a gift,” as Slater’s aid Stacy (Geena Davis) insists while attacking Frida, who ultimately kills her for her complicity. Slater continues to make this argument, claiming that forgiveness doesn’t exist, only forgetting (and implying that he suffered some form of abuse in his past).
Logistically, though, some confusion would be understandable. For example: How long was Frida on the island the previous year? It’s implied that Slater’s gatherings last for weeks at a time; Frida may have forgotten that period, but how did she account for her own absence from the working-class life where she seems to barely eke out a living? Why doesn’t Jess remember a time when her best friend mysteriously jetted off to some unknown location? Why, for that matter, would Slater want to push the boundaries of his forgetting drug by re-engaging with someone who has already been on the island, especially given his implication that he’s surprised by Frida’s adeptness at forgetting? His reasoning expressed to Frida (“you’re like my best friend”) is momentarily chilling, but doesn’t actually make much sense. It all makes the characters seem as if they’re serving a prescribed purpose, rather than living and breathing on their own.
Are there any more twists in the Blink Twice movie?
There’s one more twist to the ending of Blink Twice that feels more thematic than organic. After Frida laces Slater’s vape pen with the gift-bag perfume made from the forgetting flower, he is horrified to “discover” the bodies littering his island. Frida neglects to kill him, however, instead pulling him from the now-burning villa. The camera pulls out to a wider shot of a smoke-smudged Frida and an unconscious Slater before cutting to a more sterile, familiar environment: some kind of gala dinner like the one that Frida and Jess worked at the beginning of the film. Slater is once again well-dressed and in the company of other rich folks – only we realize, when he reacts to the appearance of a friend (Kyle MacLachlan) seen earlier in the film with foggy confusion, that he’s still under the influence of the flower. Then Kravitz reveals Frida as the CEO of Slater’s tech company. As he struggles to cut his steak, she looks serenely powerful. She’s attained the good life she was after when she met Slater King in the first place.
In a sense, she’s turning the tables on Slater, using the permanently addled bliss of the perfume to keep him in a different sort of captivity. Rather than sexual slavery, she takes over his business and his fortune. (It’s like the Hold Steady song says: Guys go for looks; girls go for status.) It’s fitting dramatic irony, but it also doesn’t entirely fit the character we’ve seen develop over the past 90 minutes, or begin to answer the movie’s own questions about the psychological effects of forgetting. Has Frida insulated herself against her horrific trauma with money? Surely she deserves her revenge and financial compensation, but is it just to leave Slater in a life of blissful ignorance rather than exposing him? Is this a satire of girl-boss feminism, or an example of it? In literal terms, what happens at the end of Blink Twice is easily explained. Emotionally – the why of it all, beyond “because it fits the theme of the movie” – it’s harder to pin down.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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