Two movies about gender and violence...
Spoiler warnings for entire review.
Blink Twice
Blink Twice, directed by actress Zoe Kravitz in her directorial debut, is the first movie I've seen that comes with a trigger warning before it begins. And not a "flashing lights" warning, which I've seen at the start of another movie, but a content warning. Specifically, a content warning for sexual assault.
The film follows Frida (Naomi Ackie), a waitress who, along with her roommate and best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), works the reception for an event held by tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). Frida has a huge crush on Slater, in spite of the fact that Slater has been accused of some unspecified "inappropriate behavior" of the "Me Too" variety, which forced him to step down as CEO of his own company. In order to "heal" and "learn" from this experience, Slater...bought a private island. He also goes to therapy! But mostly he throws parties on the private island.
After catching Frida's eye and flirting with her the entire night, Slater invites her and Jess to the island along with his group of friends which include aspiring tech moguls, D-list celebrities, and various hangers-on. Frida and Jess jump at the chance to party on a billionaire's private island, so they say yes and hop on Slater's jet.
Once on the island, they find that it was totally cool that they didn't pack anything because there are clothes and toiletries provided for them. However, they are asked to give up their phones. But Slater assures them "you won't have to do anything you don't want to do". Sure, buddy.
What follows is an absolute orgy of drugs, drinks, pool-lounging, and haute cuisine. Slater has an army of people working on the island, including landscapers, cooks, security, and cleaners. The days and nights pass by in a blur to the point where Jess and Frida don't even know what day it is...and they don't really care. Or do they?
Jess confides in Frida that something feels wrong, but she just can't put her finger on what. It feels like she's forgetting something. Or more like everyone is forgetting something. She wants to go home. Frida tries to console her, but Frida is really starting to like Slater and they're spending a lot of time together on the island...she doesn't want to leave.
The next morning, Jess is gone. And no one remembers her except for Frida who promptly starts freaking out. One of the other women, Sarah (Adria Arjona), comes by Frida's room with Jess's lighter, the one everyone has been sharing during the entire trip. The name "Jess" is written on it. Sarah points to a bruise she has that she can't explain. Frida says that every morning she wakes up and there is dirt under her fingernails but she doesn't know why. They realize that something horrible is happening on the island and somehow they don't remember it.
It's rape, you guys. The men rape the women every night. And they use this perfume made of flowers that are cultivated on the island to erase the women's memories. In flashbacks we see some pretty graphic depictions of the men chasing down the women, tying them to various pieces of furniture in the house, and raping them while they scream and cry. So, yeah, that trigger warning was a good idea!
So how do the ladies end up remembering these events? Snake venom, obviously! There are snakes on the island and if you drink their venom or get bitten by one it reverses the effects of the perfume. Jess got bitten by a snake the night she had her freakout and so Slater murders her since she won't be able to forget all the...rape.
So....ok, here's the thing. The whole perfume for forgetting/snake venom for remembering shit is not necessary and is really confusing. It leads to a bunch of questions about how exactly it would work. It's really dumb, in my opinion. It's unneeded. Slater King is a tech mogul billionaire. He could just create a designer roofie to slip the women every night that would have the same effect. I feel that the whole perfume/venom stuff took away from the movie big time, especially since so much time was spent on figuring it all out. Like...why? The time spent on Frida and Sarah discovering HOW Slater is doing this could have been spent on character and plot development.
Blink Twice is a rape-revenge movie and I love rape-revenge movies. Sure enough, there is a reckoning when all the women, after doing snake venom-infused tequila shots, remember what the men do to them every night and...well, they try to murder all the men but it doesn't quite work and the only women left alive at the end of the night are Sarah and Frida. For a rape-revenge movie, Blink Twice kinda disappoints when it comes to the revenge. Yes, a bunch of the men die. It's basically a bloodbath which culminates in Slater's mansion burning to the ground. But it doesn't really feel like justice. It just feels sloppy and anti-climatic.
I think there were some good ideas in this movie, but ultimately Kravitz goes in for too much style and not enough substance. It seems that Kravitz intended Blink Twice to be both a fun thriller but also a message movie about abuse of power, and it doesn't fully succeed as either. It's too upsetting and intense to be a fun thriller, but it's too...goofy with the perfume/venom shit to be serious.
I will say that the ensemble cast, which includes (besides Ackie, Shawkat, Tatum, and Arjona) Simon Rex, Geena Davis, Haley Joel Osment, Christian Slater, and Kyle MacLachlan, is great. These are are phenomenal actors (and all very funny, too) and they work well together. There's a lot to enjoy about Blink Twice even if it's a bit disappointing in the end.
Grade: B
***
Strange Darling
I didn't know about Strange Darling until about a week ago and all I heard was "it's great" and "don't read anything about it. Go in cold". So I did! And while it has some flaws, I'd say overall it was a really fun experience.
If you think you might want to see it, stop reading now and go see it! This review will give the entire plot away.
The film, which stars Willa Fitzgerald as "The Lady" and Kyle Gallner as "The Demon", is presented in six chapters, starting with chapter 3, titled "Somebody Please Help Me". It opens on the Lady running desperately through a field trying to avoid the Demon, who is chasing her with a rifle. They end up in a car chase that results in the Lady crashing her car and running into the woods. She stumbles across and house and begs to be let inside.
As the movie progresses, we start to put the plot together. The woman and the man (I can't just keep calling them the Lady and the Demon, because that sounds fucking weird) meet in a bar, drive to a motel, and discuss getting a room. The woman straight up asks the man if he's a serial killer (he says he is not) and says that men have no idea the risks women take to "have a little fun". After he assures her that he's not going to kill her, she reveals what she wants him to do to her and we cut to him choking her while she's handcuffed to the bed. She keeps begging him to choke her harder and harder and finally tells him to stop out of frustration. "This isn't working" she says. "It was your idea" he says. After she insults him a bit more, he recuffs her to the bed and slaps her, and genuinely chokes her and berates her. She begs him to stop, but he tells her she asked for this and she tearfully agrees...
...before saying the safeword, "Mister Snuffleupagus". He stops and unties her, comforting her while she cries. After recovering a bit, she asks if he wants to do coke with her. "It makes me very horny" she says and he reluctantly agrees. After they do their bumps, she begins acting cold and rude to him again, pissing him off. But when he says "coke doesn't seem to make you horny, it just puts you in a bad mood", she reveals that while indeed she did coke, what he took (from a separate bottle she hid from him) is ketamine...and he's about to fall deep into that k-hole, baby!
Well, it turns out that little Miss Snuffleupagus is a serial killer known as "The Electric Lady". We don't know all the details except that she favors using a knife and a taser to torture her victims. She spends some time carving her initials into his chest and torturing him and then goes to stab him in the throat, but he happens to have a gun hidden in his ankle holster and he shoots her ear off with it. She runs out of the room, steals a car, and the chase is on. Oh, by the way, the guy is a cop. Not that it saves him in the end.
Strange Darling owes a lot to the movies of Quentin Tarantino. The out of order plot, the ultraviolence, the retro feel of the movie--all markers of Tarantino. And the way Tarantino approaches female characters is mirrored in Strange Darling as well. Basically, exploitative sexism dressed up as feminism (don't get me wrong, I love Tarantino movies, but they are very much NOT feminist movies, even when they feature kickass women). Similarly, Strange Darling shows the ways in which people can be easily fooled by feminine wiles. Our Electric Lady here is a psychopath...she is able to manipulate the various people she encounters using sex appeal or tears depending on what she wants and who the "mark" is. Willa Fitzgerald is a revelation in this movie. Her performance is genuinely unnerving. We watch her turn on the tears and beg for help, only to cut the throat of the people who help her minutes later.
There's one scene that brings the movie down from an A to an B+ for me. When the already very clear message about how easy it is for this woman to get people to underestimate her is made so explicit and on the nose, that it felt like we got dropped into a Daily Wire movie for a minute. The man is able to handcuff the woman to a chest freezer after overpowering her. He calls for backup. She is able to grab him and bite his jugular and he bleeds out. When the cops arrive, she is whimpering and has pulled her pants down. A young, female cop looks at the scene and assumes that the man she killed was trying to rape her. The older, male cop points out that they don't know what happened and need to call for more backup. The young, female cop says "Just because I have a VAGINA doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing!"
Well, of course, after they uncuff her and put her in the squad car, she ends up holding them at gunpoint because she grabbed the gun off the guy she killed. Turns out the dumb lady cop was wrong and the older male cop was right!! Who would have thunk it? It's a really tone deaf scene that feels like it would make sense in a conservative movie making fun of those wacky liberals and feminists who just assume that all women are victims and all men are rapists! It really made me wonder about what director JT Mollner intended to say here. Because it sounds like he's saying "feminists are stupid and gullible".
So yeah, that scene aside, Strange Darling is a pretty fun and unique film. It's unhinged, it's perverse, it's sleazy, and it's a wild-ass ride. Kyle Gallner and Willa Fitzgerald are great as the leads. Strange Darling kept me guessing throughout the movie...although now that I know all the plot twists I'm not sure it would be a fun movie to revisit.
Grade: B+
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