“Blink Twice,” a new psychological thriller cowritten and directed by Zoë Kravitz, is stuffed with twists and turns.
Kravitz’s directorial debut stars Naomi Ackie as Frida, a cocktail waitress and aspiring nail artist in desperate need of a vacation. She meets tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) while working at a lavish gala for his company, King-Tech. Frida charms her way into a trip to his private island with her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat).
Phones are swiftly surrendered, and Frida loses track of the days as she falls into a cycle of drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and partying with Slater and his posse.
It doesn’t take too long before Frida starts noticing unsettling peculiarities, like unexplained dirt under her fingernails and a maid killing the island’s venomous snakes.
Once Frida pieces together the sinister things really happening on the island, the action kicks into high gear.
Here’s a breakdown of the film’s climax and satisfying ending.
Frida and Sarah team up to take down Slater and the men who have been abusing and exploiting the women.
Slater is initially presented as a charming billionaire who credits therapy with changing his life. But his sadistic behavior becomes clearer later in the movie.
After Jess gets bitten by a viper one night, she decides she’s had enough of the island. But Frida has no desire to leave because, for the first time in her life, she’s not invisible. The next day, Frida wakes up and goes about her typical routine: spraying herself with a perfume made from a red desideria flower found only on the island, getting dressed in the same white outfit, and joining the rest of the group for another day of relaxation.
When a maid gives Frida a green liquid to drink that’s actually snake venom, she begins to regain fragments of memories. Another guest on the island named Sarah (Adria Arjona) then confides in Frida and says she’s having a good time but also has a weird feeling that something’s off — especially considering that none of the women besides Frida have any memory of Jess, who vanished without explanation.
Frida and Sarah figure out that the perfume is erasing the women’s memories and that snake venom is the key to remembering. To help the other women regain their memories without raising suspicion, Frida and Sarah give them tequila shots mixed with venom. Stacey (Geena Davis), Slater’s scatter-brained assistant, also takes venom-laced shots with them.
Frida regains more of her memories and learns that Jess was murdered by the men because the snake bite prevented her from forgetting. Moreover, Frida and the other women have been subjected to varying degrees of sexual violence by Slater and the other men every night.
In another flashback, Slater’s trauma therapist, Rich (Kyle MacLachlan), who specializes in repressed memories, marvels at how Frida won’t remember any of the horrible things happening. The more traumatic the experience, the less Frida remembers, Slater tells him.
Back in the present day, Slater sees that the women are acting strange at dinner, so Frida and Sarah start a dance party to create a distraction. The action immediately picks up when Camilla (Liz Caribe) and Heather (Trew Mullen) regain their memories.
Camilla stabs Tom (Haley Joel Osment) to death and Heather clobbers Vic (Christian Slater) in the head with a chessboard. Stan (Cris Costa), Slater’s security guard, shoots Heather dead and chases Frida into the woods. Just as Stan is about to shoot Frida, Sarah hits him in the head with a massive rock and kills him. Slater then murders Camilla by stepping on her neck.
Stacey, meanwhile, is angry that Frida made her remember and tries to kill her. Frida stabs Stacey to death in defense, and Sarah shoots Cody (Simon Rex) dead.
Among Slater’s collection of photos of past guests, Frida finds an old Polaroid of herself with a completely different haircut. This reveals that she’s already been to his island, but those memories have been wiped.
Frida and Sarah then walk toward Slater’s compound — where he’s barricaded himself, Vic, and Lucas (Levon Hawke) inside — armed with a knife and a gun. As Frida enters the building, Sarah shoots Lucas from a distance and kills him instantly.
While fighting Slater, Frida regains more memories, revealing that she got the scar on the side of her face (which Slater had previously asked her about) after an incident in the woods with Slater during her previous visit to the island.
Slater ties up Frida and tells her that there’s no such thing as forgiveness, there’s just forgetting — and Frida is amazing at forgetting, as she forgot the island entirely after her last visit. He also says the world would be better if people were freed from remembering things.
Slater also implies that he and his sister were molested by an older male. This is presumably the traumatic event that happened to him before he was 10 and caused him to have few memories of that period, as he mentioned to Frida earlier in the film.
Slater is interrupted by Sarah entering the compound, and he runs after her, leaving Frida on the floor.
Slater drags Sarah into the room where Frida, who cut herself free using a glass shard, is holding the knife. Slater grabs her knife and Frida thinks he’s going to kill her, but he says he won’t because she’s his best friend.
As Slater is about to cut Sarah’s throat, he takes a hit of his vape pen and suddenly becomes disoriented. It’s revealed that when Frida freed herself from the ropes, she also laced his vape with the memory-erasing perfume he’d been using on the women.
Slater trips and falls over, knocking over some of the candles and causing a fire to spread. Before the compound fully goes up in flames, presumably finishing off a severely injured Vic, Frida and Sarah pull Slater out.
“I need a vacation,” Frida tells Sarah.
Frida gets what she wants in the end.
Frida, Sarah, and Slater are the only survivors of the trip. It’s unclear what specifically happened in the aftermath of the big fight, but Frida’s life has drastically turned around and she successfully climbed the social ladder.
The film concludes with another King-Tech gala, presumably the next year.
At the event, Rich approaches Slater and asks if they can continue their discussions. But Slater appears confused by what the man is referring to. Frida, who’s now married to Slater and sporting a longer haircut, interjects and tells the doctor that they’re going to be in Beijing next week so he won’t be available.
Frida then gives Slater his vape liquid, which mostly likely contains the memory-erasing desideria substance, and tells him to eat his steak. Her comment is a callback to earlier in the film, during the first dinner on the island, when Slater told Frida he doesn’t eat red meat and she chose not to eat it either in solidarity with him.
Now, their dynamic has been flipped; it’s implied that Frida is regularly tampering with Slater’s memories via his vape liquid and controlling him.
Then, a man onstage refers to her as Frida King, the CEO of King-Tech. Everyone at the gala claps for her, and the film ends with Frida getting her Champagne glass refilled by a cocktail waitress.
The final sequence drives home the film’s exploration of power and the dynamics between men and women.
The last scene is a full circle moment for Frida, who’s no longer invisible. Instead, she’s in a powerful position and isn’t subservient to a man.
“I wanted to see a story that explored what might happen if women stop playing by the rules,” Kravitz wrote in a statement included in the production notes for “Blink Twice.”
Kravitz, who grew up in Hollywood thanks to her parents Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, said that she’s seen, experienced, and heard about things that inspired her to make a film about the dynamics between men and women. Kravitz added that the movie isn’t about any particular person.
“This is about people,” she wrote. “Women are being told to smile, every day, all the time. We are expected to ‘forget’ moments of discomfort, terror, and abuse and to keep pretending we are having a good time. We are expected to play the game.”
The movie ends on a well-deserved note for Frida, who’s fully in control and calling all the shots while Slater has become her head-empty puppet.
“This is not a story about empowerment,” Kravitz said. “This is a story about power.”
“Blink Twice” is in theaters now.
