Zoë Kravitz says she wanted to exorcize her rage with ‘Blink Twice,’ her shocking #MeToo-inspired thriller

Two words formed the seed of Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut: “P—y Island.”
It’s a phrase that likely either evokes curiosity or triggers offence. That’s precisely why Kravitz wanted it as the title of her film. Every “P—y”-induced wince suggested a ripe opportunity to reclaim the word.
But, as the story often goes, the Motion Picture Association of America thought differently. As did movie theatres, marketing teams and many prospective female viewers. They may have been ready for a psychological thriller tackling gender disparity and sexual violence, but put the P-word on a movie ticket? Plaster it on a billboard? Inconceivable. Kravitz concluded that society was simply “not ready to embrace” the title and opted instead for “Blink Twice.”
It’s a fitting reflection of the stutter-step progress explored in her film, which opens with a tech billionaire’s #MeToo mea culpa. Slater King, played by a characteristically charming but refreshingly ominous Channing Tatum, offers a few spit-shined apologies before crediting his rehabilitation to the sanctuary of his new private island. The rest of the film takes place on that slice of paradise, where, surrounded by an entourage of other rich and powerful men, women are flown in as eager guests before quickly becoming victims.
That this storyline could just as easily be the non-fictional focus of a contemporary documentary speaks to a key motivator behind the project: anger.
“There was definitely a decent amount of rage involved,” Kravitz told the Star of her directorial debut, which opens Friday.
The filmmaker wanted to find a way to channel that rage and mirror the problematic behaviour she had witnessed throughout her career.
“I was so perplexed by the absurdity of what women are asked to do,” she said. “I really wanted to try and find a way to highlight that absurdity. I was trying to find a way to make people look at it from a different point of view.”
That point of view, borne of Kravitz’s own experience in the industry and as the daughter of Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz, is impressively sharp. Stylish shots of the film’s sprawling Mexican villa punctuate a well-paced descent into horror, where women are manipulated into forgetting the atrocities inflicted on them night after night.
“When you watch this film and you think, ‘This is insane!’ I’m like, ‘Well, this is actually what it’s like, on some scale, for women having to smile through pain and trauma without speaking to each other because we’re afraid and having to pretend that we don’t remember.’”
In “Blink Twice,” forgetting trumps forgiveness. At times, this is wilful — a tactic for women to distance themselves from their suffering. At others, it’s coerced, echoing a long-standing dynamic that Kravitz was eager to tease out from the real world. Her world. Five years into the writing process with E.T. Feigenbaum (who worked with Kravitz on the streaming series “High Fidelity”), she revisited the script to reflect the wave of #MeToo allegations.
“It was a really interesting challenge,” Kravitz said. “Even though the conversation has changed, there’s still the dynamic of power and the concept of the performative apology. I was really thankful for the fact that we were tapping into something that was this living, breathing thing that kept changing, and we had to adapt and adapt and adapt. It was part of what made this process so special.”
Another element that made the process special was directing her then-boyfriend, now-fiancé Tatum, whose King suggests an amalgam of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Ted Bundy. The two hadn’t met when Kravitz was developing the character, but she wrote it with Tatum in mind. She wanted to cast a man engaged with the film’s themes of sexual politics and collective trauma, and Tatum struck her as a “true feminist.” Kravitz considers that a rarity.
“It’s a unique quality in men in general,” she said. “It’s very special, and I felt that way after seeing ‘Magic Mike.’ That specifically was a movie about men for women. It was really like this gift to women, but also just so respectful and aware of women. I just felt he was somebody who wouldn’t be afraid to tell this story and would add so much to it. The fact that we think we know who he is, and we’ve only seen him in one particular way, really serves the story in this incredible way.”
Disproving every “don’t work with your partner” advice column, the couple have been giving each other glowing performance reviews. Kravitz is a “beast,” a “genius” and “insanely smart,” he has said. Tatum, she has said, is the love of her life, who held her while she cried on the bathroom floor and supported her “in every way.” The pair have received similar praise from the rest of the cast, which includes Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan and Levon Hawke (son of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke).
But the most captivating performances are from the two leading women, Naomi Ackie and Adria Arjona, who so effectively take viewers along the trajectory from cocktail-sipping naiveté to brute survivalism.
And Kravitz holds nothing back when it comes to that brutality. Gruesome flashbacks are more disturbing for their proximity to reality than for their fictional audacity. Momentary glimpses of assault echo lifetimes of inequity and abuse. A longtime horror fan, Kravitz wanted to wield that violence in an explicit but strategic way.
“As a woman (with) my own rage, I wanted to exorcize that,” she said. “But also, a lot of my favourite films are driven by men. There’s this feeling that ‘rom-coms are for girls’ and ‘these movies are for boys.’ So, ‘Hey, I like these movies, too. How cool would it be if they were from our point of view?’ I was creating something that I wanted to see myself.”
While “Blink Twice” doesn’t necessarily ask new questions, it emphasizes important ones: How fragile are our cultural reckonings? Are women forgetting what we shouldn’t forgive? How much of our perceived progress is a smokescreen?
Kravitz might have made “Blink Twice” in a post-#MeToo world, but she doesn’t consider the film a reflection of the past.
“I think this is still where we’re at,” she said.
A star-studded psychological horror film might be an extreme way into the conversation, but stagnant times call for nightmare-inducing measures.
“A lot of people that don’t have (women’s) experiences really don’t understand, and you do have to find a way to heighten it or put it in a different language so that they can understand,” Kravitz said. “So hopefully this invites people into our experience, so that they can be a little bit more compassionate.”