This article contains spoilers for Blink Twice.
In August, Zoë Kravitz released her directorial debut, a vivid, trippy, darkly funny horror film set on a private island owned by a tech billionaire, Slater King (played by Channing Tatum). The movie’s protagonist, Frida (Naomi Ackie), is a broke cater waiter and nail artist who sneaks into the VIP section of an event she’s been working, only to trip on her heels and fall flat on her face. When Slater extends a hand to help her up, he’s lit from behind, a dazzling white knight; when he fixes her shoe, then whisks her away from unpaid rent and menial work to join a group of revelers on his island, the fairy-tale comparisons are almost too on the nose. This is the stuff, Kravitz suggests, that modern-day dreams are made of: the dead-eyed hunk, the state of permanent vacation, the numbing cycles of consumption and overindulgence.
But the director (who co-wrote the movie with E. T. Feigenbaum) also has a different theory in mind—one that unfurls with destabilizing intensity as the movie goes on. Blink Twice is a story about what men are capable of when no rules apply to them and their actions have no consequences. I have to spoil the movie to be able to explain why it unnerved me so: Midway through, Frida’s roommate and best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), disappears, and no one in the group except Frida appears to remember her. The truth slowly coalesces—Slater and his friends have been drugging the assembled women of the party and sexually assaulting them at night, exploiting the memory-loss-inducing qualities of a rare flower that grows on the island. The flower is called desideria, or “desires”; its amnesiac qualities are counteracted by snake venom, which Frida is tricked by a well-meaning maid into ingesting. Frida eventually learns what happened to Jess; she also, slowly, regains her memories, via excruciating flashbacks. (“The worse it is, the more they forget,” she recalls hearing Slater telling a co-conspirator.) Tatum exudes moments of real menace as Slater, but he and his cohort of hangers-on are generally less terrifying than they are pathetic, even as the movie understands that pathetic men can be the most dangerous men of all.
This last point is the one that’s stayed with me ever since. Blink Twice nods at a tangle of different contemporary ailments: lifestyle fetishism, wellness hedonism, our obscene fealty to stolid tech bros and their untrammeled wealth. More than anything, though, the movie captures a cultural shift toward woman-hating that’s become more and more discernible over the months since its premiere. As time goes on, this reordering of things has felt less like a backlash and more like a very intentional affront. Rape culture isn’t back, exactly, because it never went away. But it is newly unfettered, and even openly celebrated, in high schools and on social media and among jubilant fans of the incoming president’s administration.
[Read: Misogyny comes roaring back]
Reviewing Blink Twice what feels like a million years ago, back in August, The Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch lamented how dated it felt, coming across “distinctly like the product of an era that’s just passed.” It’s true that Blink Twice makes obvious allusions to Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested on charges of trafficking underage girls before his death in 2019, and who had his own private island in the Caribbean. But the bacchanals the movie depicts also seem to nod at Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was arrested a month after its release for charges of racketeering and sex trafficking, and accused of staging coercive, drug-fueled orgies nicknamed “freak-offs.” (Combs has pleaded not guilty.) And, watching, I couldn’t not think of Dominique Pelicot, whose trial in France over the past few months for enabling at least 70 different men to allegedly sexually assault his drugged wife has been one of the most horrific legal spectacles in recent memory. All this happened before the election; before a subsequent parade of men’s-rights figureheads and alleged abusers started strutting their way toward the White House; before “Your body, my choice” became the manosphere’s preferred taunt.
Blink Twice seems to have anticipated all of the above: the alleged abuses disguised by debauchery, the apparent willingness of the most banal men to commit atrocities, the insecurity that drives people to hurt women. Slater’s posse includes Vic (Christian Slater), a sleazy photographer who’s perpetually taking Polaroids and mixing drinks; Cody (Simon Rex), a chef; Tom (Haley Joel Osment), a former child star with minimal charm; and Lucas (Levon Hawke), an ardent fanboy of Slater’s who’ll do anything to please him. During the day, the men fawn over Slater and hang needily around the women, desperate for affirmation. One recurring joke in the movie involves Cody repeatedly infuriating Sarah (Adria Arjona), the former star of a reality show, by calling her “babe.” Impossible luxury can hide a multitude of sins, but not all.
One of Kravitz’s major accomplishments in the movie is how she and the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, make an island paradise feel like hell on Earth. They wield primary colors like cudgels. Slater’s mansion is terra-cotta red, which in cinematic color theory signals danger and lust; the snakes on the island are yellow, for sickness and deceit. Newport-Berra films the landscape with a fish-eye effect, distorting perspective and making what we see feel eerie and unreliable. Slater’s guests, arriving without luggage, are provided with matching clothes and swimsuits, all in white. The women wear white dresses with sashes that tie at the back, like vestal virgins presented as tribute. “So do you think the human sacrifice is before or after dinner?” Jess asks Frida, as a joke. Frida decides that the clothes aren’t weird, just offbeat rich-people behavior.
Aesthetically, at least, the matching clothes pop against the sky-blue pool, the lush tropical greenery. For dinner, Cody serves up oozing portions of rare steak, wine the color of blood, gleaming raw tuna. When Vic presents the guests with “droppies,” or a psilocybin and MDMA tincture that he promises “will introduce you to your ancestors,” the mixture is a violent shade of emerald. The first night, at dinner, Frida spills meat juice on her dress, leaving a dark red stain between her breasts. But when she finally goes to bed at dawn, her dress is somehow spotless and unsullied, all evidence of the night’s excesses cleaned up.
The white linen apparel feels like an explicit allusion to Combs’s famous “white parties” in the aughts—the annual affairs thrown in the Hamptons or Saint-Tropez or Beverly Hills where guests were obligated to wear white, supposedly to democratize, bringing media moguls and socialites and movie stars together on equal footing. But all-white clothing also suggests blankness and control—an ethos that seems core to the allegations against Combs. Dozens upon dozens of people have accused him of sexual assault and coercion, with some claiming that he encouraged or demanded prolific drug use to make victims pliable before subjecting them to nonconsensual group sex and violent abuse. (Combs has categorically denied all accusations of sexual abuse.) Drugs, the musician Cassie Ventura noted in her 2023 lawsuit, also “allowed her to disassociate during these horrific encounters.” One of Combs’s neighbors in Beverly Hills told the BBC that she frequently saw women sitting lost and confused on the street outside his house, their underwear showing.
In Blink Twice, what Slater appears to enjoy the most is the disconnect between what he and his friends are doing to the women, and what the women themselves are aware of. “Are you having a good time?” he asks Frida, over and over. “I’m having a great time,” she replies. Slater seems most gratified by the power he has to orchestrate atrocities repeatedly, and in plain sight. Frida’s increasing inability to trust her own mind and understanding of reality feeds his pleasure. A similar logic seems to have driven Dominique Pelicot, who reportedly took his wife to doctor appointments when she started suffering mysterious gynecological symptoms and memory problems; at one point, according to his wife’s testimony, he jokingly asked if she was cheating on him. When his wife was drugged, he said, he could do things to her that she would never otherwise allow. Her lack of consent wasn’t a misunderstanding, as many of the men who allegedly assaulted her testified by way of defense—it was the whole point.
[Read: Not all men, but any man]
When men feel untouchable, evidence is proof not of crimes, but of achievement. Pelicot documented his wife’s suffering meticulously, keeping thousands of photos and videos in a folder labeled “Abuse.” At the very beginning of Blink Twice, before a single frame appears on-screen, we hear the click and buzz of a Polaroid camera, whose prints Frida later stumbles upon while she’s searching for her phone, which Slater’s fixer has confiscated. While Matt Gaetz, Trump’s erstwhile nominee for attorney general, served in the House of Representatives, he allegedly tried to show his fellow congressmen sexually explicit photos and videos of women he claimed he’d had sex with. For him, “it was a point of pride,” a person who’d seen the images told CNN. (Gaetz called the allegations “a lie” in a comment to CNN.) The evidence seized from Combs included “terabytes” of data held on phones, on computers, and in cloud storage.
Kravitz is sly throughout the film on these dynamics. When Frida and Sarah debate alerting the authorities, Frida imagines the men being questioned by friendly officers whom they likely play golf with. They’re insulated by brotherhood, and by a culture that Frida knows would assume that the women were asking for it. Even the Polaroids she finds are less useful as proof than as fuel for her revenge. Kravitz also nods to the ways men pit women against one another as rivals, a tactic long deployed on reality television. (“Cute nails,” Sarah says to Frida early in the movie, so dismissively that it cuts like a knife.) I’m haunted, in retrospect, by the scenes of Stacy (Geena Davis), Slater’s assistant, stumbling around, clumsy and vacant, her mind addled by years of being drugged herself. But the most sinister aspect of the movie, to me, is how banal its serial rapists are—how corny and ineffectual, these cringeworthy failsons. They bear a stark resemblance to the defendants in the Pelicot trial, who shuffle their way into court each day, seemingly shocked and resentful that they’re being held responsible for something they appear to have believed they were getting away with.
