A humdinger of a directorial debut starring an against-type Channing Tatum does a double-take on streaming

Channing Tatum is one of the good guys. Whether he’s leading the G.I. Joe charge as Duke, propping up his end of a rom-com like Fly Me to the Moon, or pulling the world’s cheekiest cameos in Bullet Train and Deadpool & Wolverine, we always want to root for Tatum.

It’s partially that reason that makes him such a compelling villain in Blink Twice, the feature directorial debut of his then-fiancée Zoë Kravitz, which nabbed over twice its production budget at the box office while getting many an earned thumbs-up from critics. Those familiar with the film know that it’s no easy watch, but that hasn’t prevented the denizens of Prime Video from tuning in.

Per FlixPatrol, Blink Twice is currently the fourth most-watched flick on the United States’ Prime Video film charts at the time of writing. Also in the running are a 10th-place Shotgun Wedding and a first-place You’re Cordially Invited, both Prime Video originals, and both being difficult watches for very different reasons than Blink Twice.

The film stars Naomi Ackie as Frida, a cocktail waitress with big dreams who becomes infatuated with the influential tech mogul Slater King (Tatum). Chance(?) leads Frida and her bestie Jess (Alia Shawkat) to getting an invite to Slater’s private island for a tropical getaway beyond their wildest dreams. But as time goes on, Frida begins to suspect that a supremely sinister plot is afoot.

Mileage will vary quite severely on Blink Twice‘s storytelling merits, given that its more intense subject matter will stick in the mind much more aggressively than the questions it asks about reality, and what it means to be subject to a reality that you have little to no say in creating. What’s irrefutable, however, is Blink Twice‘s status as a technical achievement.

Both Ackie and Tatum steer their characters with a physical and psychological depth that could simply never be conveyed on the page — the former leveraging minute physicality to convey wariness, the latter packing nine shades of evil within every unassuming gaze.

But it’s Kravitz’s direction that truly allows Blink Twice to take off the way it does. The fast-paced plot (from a script co-written by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum) opens the door for Kravitz to manipulate the audience’s perception of time (which amplifies the film’s core ideas quite effectively), and she consistently demonstrates a knack for shot composition. It’s one thing to point a camera all over a lush island with marvelous production design, but Kravitz was able to make the act of opening a desk drawer one of the most visually interesting things to happen on screen in the last year.

It is at once a failure of the wider awards bodies that Kravitz didn’t earn any directing nods for her work on Blink Twice, but the fact of her filmmaking emergence is a much more significant victory for both the industry and audience members anyway. We’ve yet to learn what her next effort behind the camera will be, but we’d all be wise to keep an extra eye and ear out for such news.