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There are a few cardinal rules that every screen character should live by: Don’t go in the basement. Never get off the boat. Never go against the family. And for fuck’s sake, never, ever go to a private island where a tech bro and his toxic buddies like to chill out, even if there are bottomless mimosas, psilocybin-microdose bonding, and the billionaire owner looks like Channing Tatum. Especially if he looks like Channing Tatum.

We’ll clarify why in a second, though the less you know about Blink Twice going in,...

Naomi Ackie fondly remembers filming late-night dance montages with her Blink Twice castmates in Yucatán, Mexico. As the Dixie Cups’ island-inflected version of “Iko Iko” blared, the actors, covered in glitter, frolicked, squealed, and cheesed into the camera. But in this nightmarish thriller (out Aug. 23), which marks Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, the party scenes hide something much darker. Channing Tatum’s tech billionaire Slater invites strangers to his private island for a hedonistic bacchanal — and every morning, the female guests wake up with a wiped memory, mystery bruises, and dirt under their nails.

“Blink Twice” opens with a blurry close-up shot of a frog, which then comes into glistening focus. The sound is eerie; the image is sinister, fascinating, mysterious and trippy. That describes the movie as well. “Blink Twice” is the first feature directed by Zoë Kravitz, who also co-wrote it (with E.T. Feigenbaum), and it’s a post-#MeToo feminist party-girl nightmare thriller that’s been made with an unusual sense of intimacy. Kravitz, the veteran actor, doesn’t rely on the standard medium shot/Pov pedestrian film grammar. She composes the movie out of vibrant close-ups, using each shot to tell a story, drawing us into the center of an encounter, so that we’re staring at it and experiencing it at the same time. Her technique is riveting; this is the work of a born filmmaker.

I wouldn’t call “Blink Twice” a horror movie, but it’s rooted in some pretty horrifying things.

None of the female stars of Zoë Kravitz’s raucous, razor-sharp directorial debut “Blink Twice” (FKA “Pussy Island”) are ever directly told to smile, but as they’re increasingly battered with queries about how much fun they’re having — the phrase “are you having a good time?” is essentially weaponized here — the implication is clear. They better be having a good time. They better smile. And they better never forget where they are. As Kravitz’s stars, including an exceptional Naomi Ackie and a revelatory Adria Arjona, are forced to flicker through various kinds of self-presentation-as-self-preservation, Kravitz’s film kaleidoscopically changes shape. And you won’t want to miss a single frame of it.

Simply described as something of a #MeToo thriller, Kravitz’s film doesn’t just interrogate the possibilities of the sub-genre, but utterly redefines it with class and style. Mostly, Kravitz (who co-wrote the script with her...

Early in Zoë Kravitz’s charged but scattered directorial debut Blink Twice, a tech tycoon caught in the storm of controversy offers a familiar kind of apology. After “everything that happened,” Slater King (Channing Tatum) says in a video, the billionaire will step back from his company. He regrets his actions and, in an effort to change, will retreat to his private island for reflection. We never find out exactly what Slater did, but in our digital wasteland littered with similarly scripted #MeToo atonements, it doesn’t take much imagination.

Frida (an excellent Naomi Ackie) seems unbothered by the allegations surrounding Slater or the feigned sincerity of his recorded remorse. When we meet the optimistic aspiring nail designer, she’s sitting on the toilet of her rundown apartment, watching the video of the beleaguered tycoon with adoring eyes, fantasizing about the day the two might meet.

It’s lucky, then,...