Zoë Kravitz‘s first film as a director sends two cocktail waitresses to a private island where the drinks never stop, the phones disappear and the days start slipping out of memory.

Blink Twice opens on an invitation that sounds too good to refuse. Frida, a cocktail waitress and nail artist, and her best friend Jess catch the eye of Slater King, a tech billionaire, at a gala, and a few hours later they are on their way to his private island. Zoë Kravitz’s first film as a director takes that fantasy of being chosen by the very rich and turns it, step by step, into a psychological thriller about what the island’s guests can and cannot remember.

Released in 2024, Blink Twice is a 102-minute American production directed by Zoë Kravitz from a screenplay she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum. Naomi Ackie plays Frida and Channing Tatum plays Slater King, with Adria Arjona, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan and Alia Shawkat around them. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced it, Amazon MGM Studios released it in American theatres on August 23, and Warner Bros. Pictures handled the international release.

An island where the days blur together

The setup is simple and deliberately seductive. On arrival, Slater’s assistant Stacy (Geena Davis) collects the guests’ phones. The women invited, among them Jess (Alia Shawkat) and Sarah (Adria Arjona), a reality-show star who soon clashes with Frida over the host’s intentions, are treated to luxury villas, a private chef, endless drinks and potent hallucinogens. Slater’s circle of friends and business partners, including Vic (Christian Slater), Cody (Simon Rex) and Tom (Haley Joel Osment), a former child star, plays host.

Then the details stop adding up. Jess notices gaps in her memory, days seem to dissolve into one another, the local staff share the same snake tattoo, and a maid appears to recognise Frida and calls her by a nickname she does not understand. Slater’s therapist, Rich (Kyle MacLachlan), comes and goes. The film’s title, borrowed from the old signal a hostage uses to say something is wrong without saying it, tells the audience early which genre it has really bought a ticket for; the rest of the plot is best discovered without further help.

From Pussy Island to Blink Twice

Zoë Kravitz began writing the script in 2017 under a working title, Pussy Island, that stayed attached to the project for years. In January 2024 the film was renamed. Kravitz explained that the Motion Picture Association and cinemas did not want the word on posters, billboards or tickets, and that women who saw the title in research told the studio they did not want to see that film, which was precisely the word she had hoped to reclaim. She said she felt a filmmaker’s responsibility to listen.

The project was announced in June 2021 as her directing debut. Channing Tatum signed on to star, MGM won the distribution rights at the Cannes Film Market, and Naomi Ackie was cast in the lead. The rest of the cast was assembled between May and June 2022, and filming began on June 23, 2022, in the Mexican states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo, with the Hacienda Temozón Sur, a restored estate in the Yucatán Peninsula, standing in for Slater’s retreat.

For Kravitz the film marked a move behind the camera after a long acting career. She made her feature debut in No Reservations (2007) and went on to X-Men: First Class, the Divergent films, Mad Max: Fury Road, Big Little Lies and Steven Soderbergh‘s Kimi, before playing Selina Kyle in The Batman (2022). She had already produced the series High Fidelity, in which she also starred, and on Blink Twice she is credited as director, co-writer and producer, alongside Bruce Cohen, Tiffany Persons, Garret Levitz and Tatum.

Channing Tatum as the host

The casting of Channing Tatum is the film’s most pointed idea. His career was built on charm: the dance drama Step Up, the comedies 21 Jump Street and The Lost City, and Magic Mike, which drew on his own past as a stripper. Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014) showed a darker side, and in 2022 he co-directed Dog with Reid Carolin. Blink Twice uses that easy, likeable screen persona for a billionaire whose generosity is the bait, and Tatum also serves as one of its producers.

Naomi Ackie carries the film as Frida. The British actress broke through in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016), won a BAFTA TV Award for the second season of The End of the F***ing World, joined the Star Wars saga in The Rise of Skywalker and played Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022). Blink Twice gave her a leading role in an original thriller, a character who is both the audience’s eyes and, by design, someone whose own perception cannot be fully trusted.

The supporting cast reads like a casting commentary on fame and its afterlife. Haley Joel Osment, Oscar-nominated as a child for The Sixth Sense, plays a former child star. Christian Slater, the teen rebel of Heathers and a Golden Globe winner for Mr. Robot, plays a business partner. Geena Davis, an Oscar winner for The Accidental Tourist, the co-star of Thelma & Louise and the founder of an institute that studies the representation of women on screen, plays the assistant who keeps everything running. Kyle MacLachlan, Adria Arjona of Andor and Hit Man, Simon Rex of Red Rocket and Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development complete the ensemble, with Levon Hawke as a young employee of Slater’s company.

The craft team behind the paradise

Behind the camera, Kravitz surrounded herself with collaborators from independent cinema and prestige television. The cinematographer is Adam Newport-Berra, whose credits include The Last Black Man in San Francisco and the series The Bear. Kathryn J. Schubert edited the film, and production designer Roberto Bonelli worked on the Yucatán sets that turn the hacienda into the billionaire’s resort.

The score, by Chanda Dancy, became one of the film’s most recognised elements. Dancy, who had scored the series Lawmen: Bass Reeves, was brought in by an MGM music supervisor, and she and Kravitz traded recordings of sounds from the wild while drawing on influences as varied as Japanese gagaku court music, Igor Stravinsky, Indonesian drumming and the theme from Fantasy Island. The score was shortlisted for Best Original Score at the 97th Academy Awards, and the soundtrack also features LCD Soundsystem’s Dance Yrself Clean and Ain’t Nobody by Rufus and Chaka Khan.

A satirical thriller in a crowded genre

Blink Twice belongs to the wave of social thrillers that followed Jordan Peele‘s Get Out (2017), another directorial debut by a performer that wrapped a sharp idea about power inside genre mechanics. Its target is a recognisable figure of the 2020s, the tech mogul who has publicly apologised, gone to therapy and rebranded himself as enlightened, and the circle of famous friends who enjoy his hospitality without asking questions. The film plays with romantic comedy and party-movie codes in its first stretch before revealing its darker purpose.

That purpose is serious enough that Amazon issued a content warning before release, flagging mature themes and depictions of violence, including sexual violence, a step that is still unusual for a studio, and attached it to theatrical screenings and streaming prints. Made for a production budget of around 20 million dollars, the film opened in fourth place in North America with 7.3 million dollars and reached about 48.1 million worldwide. Kravitz won Best First Feature from the San Diego Film Critics Society and earned nominations at the Astra Film Awards, the Black Reel Awards and the NAACP Image Awards, while Ackie earned two Black Reel nominations of her own.

Blink Twice is the kind of debut that announces a director’s interests more than it settles them: a film about memory, complicity and the price of a free holiday, made by someone who has spent most of her life on the other side of the camera watching how power works in the entertainment business. Whether its twist lands as a sharp satire or as a familiar genre turn will depend on how much of the island the viewer recognises from the news.

Tags: thrillers, United States, Jordan Peele, Christian Slater, Zoë Kravitz, Naomi Ackie, Adria Arjona, Geena Davis