By Yasmin Omar
At the London premiere of her directorial debut, Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz took to the stage and, incongruously, said she’d keep her introduction ‘very demure, very cutesy, very mindful’. It was a reference to the recent TikTok trend, which, like most digital fads, immediately lost its allure when the grown-ups began explaining it in mainstream media. At first blush, her remark felt like a slightly desperate millennial lunge towards Gen Z relevance. But, after watching the film, it clicks into place. Kravitz’s twisty psychological thriller Blink Twice is stuffed with internet buzzwords – Michelin meals ‘hit different’, brunch is ‘so fucking real’ – and pays lip service to a number of fashionable topics (‘eat the rich’ anticapitalism, female empowerment, therapy, wellness…). She clearly spends a lot of time online, and her film reflects that.
In fact when we first meet its main character, Naomi Ackie’s Frida, she is tellingly scrolling through her Instagram feed, pants around her ankles on the toilet. Her algorithm has served her a video from disgraced billionaire Slater (Channing Tatum), who stepped down from his tech company after abuses of power were made public, and is now licking his wounds on his very own private island.
