Blink Twice is a thriller so rich with twists and clues you ought to see it twice. Sure, it begins like a dream: A cocktail waitress named Frida (I Wanna Dance With Somebody's Naomi Ackie) gets swept away to the private island of a debonair tech billionaire named Slater King (Channing Tatum). But beyond bountiful brunches and endless streams of champagne and plumes of pot smoke, something sinister slinks in the shadows of this seeming paradise.
If you've seen Blink Twice and found your head spinning, we're here with the medicinal venom to set your mind straight. Let's dig into Zoë Kravitz's sensationally twisted thriller one burning question at a time.
As we delve into Blink Twice's ending, we'll be getting into spoilers. Consider yourself warned.
"Red rabbit" is first spoken by an unnamed maid who spooks Frida while she's getting settled in her guest room. She later runs into the woman again, in a grubby prep area that adjoins the glossy gift bag room. (Perhaps this drastic aesthetic shift is another hint that under the glitz is something grim.)
"Red rabbit!" The older woman says over and over to Frida, leaving the heroine bewildered. But once she takes a sip of the eyelash viper venom offered by this savior of few words, Frida will remember what "red rabbit" refers to: It's the animal (or "an-nail-mals") that adorned her fingernails the year before, when she first came to the island.
Ahead of her meet-cute with Slater at the King-Tech Gala, there are clues she's met him before. Her boss chides her for getting too "chatty" last year, and she defends herself by noting Slater talked to her first! It seems her roommate/co-worker Jess (Alia Shawkat) also knows about this encounter, as she conspires with Frida to help her reconnect with her celebrity crush, bringing the bag with the two glamorous cocktail dresses to change into, ditching their cater-waiter uniforms.
Flashbacks reveal Frida and Slater's interaction was more than a flirtation at a party. She'd been to the island before and forgotten. The abandoned lip gloss she finds in the bathroom drawer is hers; she'd left it there last year, back when her DIY nail art featured 10 little red rabbits, leaping across her fingers.
Flashbacks reveal that during her first trip to Slater's island, she was knocked down and hit her head on a rock. At that time, one of the men even scoffs, "That'll leave a mark." But Frida will leave one too.
Rewatching Blink Twice you might notice that Vic (Christian Slater), Slater's "right and left-hand man," doesn't like Frida. He antagonizes her with pointed remarks over cocktails. When she says she has a good memory, he raises an eyebrow and insists she looks familiar, asking if they've met before.
He takes this risky joke at her expense a step further when Slater's therapist Dr. Rich (Kyle MacLachlan) comes to visit. He asks if the two have met, and Frida chirps they had, at the gala. Rich looks surprised, not because he doesn't remember her but because the assaults against her are ongoing; he witnessed one himself the previous night. Rich is stunned that the perfume means Frida remembers nothing of the trauma she's endured on the island.
Vic uses this exchange to prove the power of the perfume, but he also relishes the power it gives him over Frida. She doesn't remember what's come before, but she can't keep her eyes off the nub of his amputated pinky finger. He catches her staring in the sauna, and stares back hard. Flashbacks explain his animosity and her connection to that missing digit. In the climactic showdown, Vic lies bleeding and likely paralyzed from Heather's vengeance, and Slater reveals to Frida it was she who bit off Vic's finger last year during her "vacation" here. She may have forgot, but Vic sure as hell didn't.
The first to die in this mind-bending thriller, Jess got wise to Slater's scheme after being bit by the indigenous viper, as we see in a flashback.
Frida realizes the perfume Slater gave her — and all the female guests — is not only from a flower native to the island, it's also a memory-erasing drug. Essentially, l'eau du roofie! But in the gift bag hut, the maid gives Frida the venom of the eyelash viper, which serves as an antidote to the forgetfulness that's caused by breathing in the perfume.
Jess's death, however, implies the venom isn't just a quick fix. Once you remember, you remember for good. Otherwise, Slater and his bros could have doped her again. Instead, in a flashback, Frida remembers him noting Jess's bite, then fatally breaking her neck.
Frida says this to Slater early on in their (second) island courtship. But as others repeat the phrase — like his assistant Stacy — it's hinted this is a Slater catchphrase that some part of Frida remembers. Another element that slips past the perfume potion is the lizard. Blink Twice's opening shot is a bright green lizard on a rock, which stares at the camera lens while distorted sounds roar in the background. Then, the film cuts to a cute little green lizard painted as nail art being posted to Frida's Instagram grid. This shows some part of her remembers her first trip to the island.
Talking with Slater, Frida notes she wishes she could forget the trauma of her past, and Slater smiles, adding he has forgotten "everything before I was 10."
In the climax, the tech billionaire brings up his sister, saying she's miserable and she can't understand why he can play tennis with "that man" after what he did to the siblings. Implied is that their father abused them horrendously, but Slater thinks that because he doesn't remember anything, the abuse doesn't affect him. However, this flimsy rationalization is what he uses to abuse others. If forgetting allows them to be happy, what's the harm of hurting them if you make them forget? Frida shows him the harm.
In the film's climax, Frida looks on, seemingly helpless, as Slater holds a knife to the neck of Sarah (Adria Arjona). Once rivals for his attention, the two women trauma-bonded over the horrors of this island. Frida begs for Sarah's life — but she's stalling. While Slater wrestles Sarah to the ground, Frida gets her hands free, thanks to quick thinking and broken glass, then pours Slater's proprietary potion of forgetfulness into his trusty vape. So, after taking a few hits while threatening Sarah, he forgets his scheme, the knife, and why there's a pile of bodies around him. Shocked, he slips and falls. In a bit of symmetry, he cracks his head on a stone table, and earns a forehead scar of his own, just like Frida.
While primping for the gala at the beginning of the movie, Frida shares this adage with Jess, crediting it to her long-lost mother. The film's final sequence sees this line pay off big, at the next annual King-Tech gala.
This time, Frida isn't serving drinks; she's serving as CEO of the company as Mrs. Frida King. Slater — with his forehead scar and his trusty vape filled with forgetting potion — is less her partner and more her pleasant puppet. She can even goad him into giving up his vegetarianism for a thick steak now. His plans to spread the perfume seem to have been squashed, as she has security lead the nefarious Dr. Rich away from her husband. Then, Frida accepts the praise of the dinner party, who raise their glasses to her. All the while, the funky song Frida listened to on her headphones on her way to work the last gala plays over the events. It is, quite fittingly, James Brown's "The Payback."
While the story feels pretty self-contained, there's a curious thread left dangling. What of Slater's sister? The way Slater talks about her — even avoiding the use of her name — suggests they are estranged. But could the news of him turning over a new leaf and getting a new wife bring her back into his life? What would that mean for Frida? Could exposure to his sister resurface dark memories from his past? Could this sister come to question his reliance on his vape and throw Frida's safety into question?
Or, consider the bigger picture. Sarah and Frida know the truth of the island, and they have some idea of how its dastardly perfume has reached out to the wider world through gifts to vile men. Will they seek to bring the others down? Or perhaps vice versa? When memory isn't guaranteed and money is no object, Blink Twice 2 could go even wilder.
Blink Twice is now in theaters.
