Kravitz, Zoe

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    Zoë Kravitz’s ‘Blink Twice’ Is a Horror Mystery Inspired by Her Frustrations

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    In the summer of 2017, Zoë Kravitz, on a break from shooting a movie, posted up at a cafe in London with her laptop and began drafting her first full screenplay.It wasn’t immediately clear to her what it would become, she said: “At first I wrote this kind of stream-of-consciousness novella, where the characters came to life.”They eventually inhabited “Blink Twice,” her directorial debut, which revolves around a tech billionaire with a private party island and the guests — whether unsuspecting, or complicit — who are lured there. It’s a Bacchanalia with shades of “Lord of the Flies” and Adam and Eve. At once a psychosexual thriller, a horror-mystery, a revenge fantasy, a dark comedy and a commentary on gender and class, “Blink Twice” was not inspired by any one event, or by her professional trajectory, Kravitz said in a recent video interview.“It was more of an emotional thing that I was trying to work out — a combination of my own experiences and experiences of friends and family, other women that I’m close to, and not really having a place to put those frustrations and complicated feelings,” she said.She had always wanted to direct, she said, but had no plans for how that would come to pass. But as she wrote — she finished the screenplay with her friend E.T. Feigenbaum — she realized she couldn’t “trust somebody else with this vision that I was having.”The polished “Blink Twice,” due Friday, stars an ensemble led by Channing Tatum, now Kravitz’s fiancé, and Naomi Ackie (“Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker”). The cast includes Adria Arjona (“Hit Man”), Haley Joel Osment and Geena Davis. They shot on location in the Yucatán, “about an hour away from any real town,” Kravitz said, giving them a heightened sense of camaraderie. “We ate all our meals together. We hung out on the weekends. It was like this magical, magical time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Blink Twice’ Review: Zoë Kravitz and Channing Tatum’s Horror Mystery

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      The director Zoë Kravitz creates an uneasy atmosphere in her abduction horror flick, starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum.For a film like “Blink Twice” to land its horror-stained commentary on sexual assault and cancel culture as well as class and race, it would need a director capable of pushing beyond basic social politics. In her debut feature, Zoë Kravitz is not that director.Rather her film, for which she also wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, exists more as a concept than a complete idea. The same could be said of the film’s protagonist, Frida (Naomi Ackie). She pines for the lifestyle of the disgraced tech mogul Slater King, played by Channing Tatum, Kravitz’s partner.Frida and her roommate, Jess (Alia Shawkat), work as servers at a gala — which allows the two women to switch into eye-catching dresses to mingle with the rich. When Frida snaps her heel, it’s Slater who helps her up, leading to a night of reverie culminating in an invite to his private island, where he has retreated after issuing a public apology for actions the film leaves relatively unknown.For the tech mogul’s entourage, Kravitz has assembled an impressive cast: Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke. These men are meant to elicit dread, with an appetizing drink in hand. But only Slater King’s therapist, Rich (Kyle MacLachlan), knows how to play pleasantness as threatening.Kravitz crafts an uneasy atmosphere. Days and nights blend into one for an endless summer filled with perfume and parties, producing a double-edged pace that has snap even while it lulls viewers into malaise. The cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra uses shadows to carve Ackie’s face, foretelling the angst she’ll feel when friends begin to disappear, gaps in her memory occur and an exoticized Indigenous woman calls her by another name.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haley Joel Osment, ‘Sixth Sense’ Star, Is Content 25 Years Later

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      Haley Joel Osment’s childhood memories are not like other people’s. He remembers the kindness with which Tom Hanks treated him, when he was 5 and playing Hanks’s son in “Forrest Gump.” And the time Russell Crowe adjusted his bow tie at an awards show when Osment, not yet 12, was Oscar-nominated for his breakout performance in “The Sixth Sense.” The in-depth conversations he had with Steven Spielberg about the future as they were filming “A.I.” that same year.A phalanx of Osment clones, made for that movie, are still floating around — he heard they might have ended up stockpiled in Peter Jackson’s trove of memorabilia in New Zealand. If the apocalypse happens, Osment jokes, that preteen version of him will survive.It is, in any case, the form in which many fans know him best — especially as the notably named Cole Sear, the teary-eyed center of “The Sixth Sense,” M. Night Shyamalan’s blockbuster supernatural thriller from August 1999. Osment’s indelibly whispered line, “I see dead people,” went from the trailer to the canon of cinema to pop culture infamy long before memes even existed to codify it (though they have now). It was a phrase so potent that, 25 years after its arrival, it is a Kendrick Lamar lyric — on a Drake diss track, no less.With its final-act twist, “The Sixth Sense” also, some cineastes argue, started “spoiler culture” — meaning that mass moviedom as we know it, with entire publicity campaigns and prickly fan bases fiercely safeguarding plotlines, sprang from that moment. A 10-year-old paired with an action star (Bruce Willis), playing against type as a child therapist, spooked audiences into repeat views, and today we scour the screen for Easter eggs and hope for the thrill of a shock.Osment with Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.” When the boy auditioned, M. Night Shyamalan recalled, “I turned to the casting director and said, ‘I don’t think I want to make this without him.’”Buena Vista PicturesOsment is now 36; he has been a working actor for nearly nine-tenths of his life, in drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, period pieces, video games and oddball stuff. He has enough credits that when a cast was made of his arm for the Amazon superhero series “The Boys,” he was able to use it again, seasons later, to beat someone in the FX vampire satire “What We Do in the Shadows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More