As a lifelong film student, there are things I see when I watch a movie that the average -goer won’t. I try not to. I try to act like someone who hasn’t seen the wiring under the board, how the sausage is made—pick your metaphor—but it’s impossible. The only time now when I’m authentically transported by a film is when it’s flawless: all the seams have been artfully hidden, plot holes meticulously filled, and special effects made genuinely special.
Zöe Kravitz’s Blink Twice didn’t transport me. It’s beautiful to a fault, a problem I find coming up often in modern directorial debuts. The sets, costumes, and cinematography gleam with the polish of an Instagram photo filter. The story has a lot of promise, and taken out of its celluloid representation, is a wicked look at psycho-sexual abuse. But in its implementation, there’s something... “Henge-y” about it.
A couple of years into our marriage, my wife and I watched the start of Paul Ziller’s Stonehenge Apocalypse, a Canadian TV sci-fi flick. I say “start of” because we made it only about ten minutes before turning it off. Now, I know that there’s a time and place for campy, B-movie level entertainment. A lot of it is done well, to the point where it has enough hooks to pull you into a complete viewing despite its obvious flaws. Like a date who charms your pants off even though they’ve got a body that looks like it’s been pulped by a blender. Stonehenge Apocalypse was not that, at least not for us, and ever since then, whenever a movie is so off that it prevents total enjoyment, we call it “Henge-y.”
I think it’s the pacing of Blink Twice that turned me off the most. A stronger edit would have fixed that, and I get that Kravitz likely didn’t want to leave even a second of the gorgeous shots or rich performances on the cutting room floor. But that was much to the detriment of the film.
At the time of this writing, Blink Twice is free on Amazon Video, so if you’re paying for that ultra-fast shipping, you can watch for “free.”
2025.02.16