Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the movie “Blink Twice,” in theaters now.
In Zoe Kravitz's directorial debut, heaven isn't quite what it seems.
At the beginning of “Blink Twice,” roommates and cocktail waitresses Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) find themselves working a party for Slater King, a handsome, charming, vaping-addicted billionaire tech CEO played by Channing Tatum.
Frida is infatuated with Slater, and at the end of the night, she and Jess are invited to spend a vacation on his private island. Slater has been hiding out these days, while Frida watches an interview in which he apologizes for some mysterious past misbehavior. He vows to improve, etc. This doesn't seem to bother Frida. She's too busy obsessing over her animal-themed nail art.
On the island, Frieda and Jess are joined by a group of other scantily clad women and Slater's inner circle, which includes his sister Stacey (Geena Davis), who doubles as his personal assistant. At the start of the trip, everyone hands over their cell phones, drinks champagne every day, lounges by the pool, eats gourmet food and takes psychedelic drugs. The only threat on the island seems to be the poisonous snakes lurking in the grass.
Soon, Frieda begins to notice strange things happening – she keeps noticing dirt under her fingernails, and a stain on her dress mysteriously disappears. The days begin to blend together, and this tropical dream turns into a nightmare when Jess is bitten by a snake. Slater and his partners assure Jess that she will not die, and leave her to rest while the party continues.
The next day, Jess begins to panic, insisting that this trip is not what it seems. But Frieda shrugs off her fears: she has caught Slater's eye, and unlike the way they were told to act as cocktail waitresses, it's nice not to feel invisible this time.
While traveling between the luxurious cottages across the island, Frida encounters a housemaid who is tasked with killing these pesky snakes. The housemaid repeatedly shouts “Red rabbit!” when she sees Frida, and in one scene, offers her a sip of a mysterious green liquid. Frida recoils upon tasting it and immediately realizes that it is snake venom.
Soon, Frieda realizes a horrifying truth: where is Jess? She hasn’t seen her friend since the snake bite, and the rest of the girls on the island don’t seem to remember her ever being there in the first place. Repressed memories begin to surface. Everything begins to make sense: every night, the women take drugs given to them by Slater and his entourage and are seen running across the grass, their white dresses fluttering behind them. Every morning, they wake up with no memory of what happened the night before. The snake venom counteracts the drugs’ numbing effects, as unspoken visions of horror seep into Frieda’s mind: under the influence of the drugs, the women (and one man, presumably) are assaulted and raped, over and over again. Stripped of these painful memories, they unknowingly go on vacation with their rapists. In one flashback, the men murder Jess—whom the snake bite will soon reveal the truth about—in front of the women.
Frida tries to explain what she discovered to another woman on the island, Sarah, a survivalist graduate played by Adria Arjona. Sarah doesn’t remember Jess, but she trusts Frida enough to drink the poison, which tastes awful. Together, they devise a plan to educate the other women on the island: mix the green poison with tequila and serve it poolside in shot glasses. However, the women are aware that even if they make it out alive, no one will likely believe their stories. “The crazy thing is getting on a plane with a bunch of guys we don’t know,” says Sarah, anticipating the arguments that will be used against them.
At the pool, even the nervous and troubled Stacey, who usually roams the island looking for menial tasks, takes some injections filled with poison. Memories erupt. But while the other women brim with legitimate rage, Stacey violently confronts Frieda. “I didn’t want to remember,” Stacey says. Of course, she knows about the crimes. She helps facilitate them. If Slater is Kravitz’s interpretation of Jeffrey Epstein, Stacey is her Ghislaine Maxwell.
Frieda manages to kill Stacey and escape. The men are on a trip, so Frieda sneaks into Slater's cabin to retrieve the phones. Instead, she finds a box of instant photos of all the women who have been brought to the island.
At dinner, Frieda and Sara bide their time as they wait for the poison to take effect on the other women. With their traumatic memories reawakened, the women go on the offensive, fighting off their rapists to the strains of Beyoncé’s “I’m That Girl.” It’s a bloodbath, during which a horrifying realization pierces Frieda’s memory: this isn’t her first time on the island. Years earlier, Frieda was violently assaulted by Slater, dragged across the floor with dirt stuck under her fingernails. Her fingernails are decorated with red rabbits.
By the end of the battle, only Frieda, Sarah, and Slater remain. Slater almost revels in the destruction, as Frieda and Sarah gain the upper hand and burn his entire estate. But as revealed in the final scene of the film, they did not kill Slater. Instead, Frieda has laced his e-cigarette with narcotics and is waiting for the authorities to rescue them, preparing for the ultimate revenge.
In a ceremony similar to the one at the beginning of the film, it is not Slater who is honored but Frieda. With her rapist at her side, Frieda takes over as CEO of Slater’s tech empire and marries him. It is an ending that is both triumphant and disturbing, as Frieda fulfills the motto she shares with Jess at the beginning of the film: “Success is the best revenge.”