In Review: 'Close Your Eyes,' 'Blink Twice'

Nearly 50 years after 'The Spirit of the Beehive,' Victor Erice makes an unexpected and masterful return. Elsewhere, Zoë Kravitz is only just getting started.

Close Your Eyes
Dir. Victor Erice
169 min.

“Miracles haven’t existed in movies since Dreyer died.”

So says Max (Mario Pardo), a film editor and projectionist in Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, likely referencing the transcendental ending of Carl Dreyer’s 1955 masterpiece Ordet, but perhaps giving the audience of this extraordinary film a wink, too. It has been just over 50 years since Erice’s debut feature, The Spirit of the Beehive, so enraptured critics that it earned a spot in the Sight and Sound Top 100 poll, and over 30 years since the director himself has made a movie, just the fourth in his career. Seeing any Victor Erice film in the year 2024 seems like a miracle, but Close Your Eyes turns out to be much more than a novelty, a quietly assured and profoundly personal film that affirms the power of cinema without going full Cinema Paradiso. It’s warm but mournful, too. 

Fans of The Spirit of the Beehive will remember the importance that the movies hold in telling the story of a small Castilian village in Franco’s Spain, where a little girl is so enraptured by a community screening of Frankenstein that she strikes out to the countryside, seeking the gentle monster. Ana Torrent, who played that little girl, appears in a crucial supporting role in Close Your Eyes, now a late-middle-aged woman who assumed that she’d lost her father forever 22 years earlier. With a patience that defines this long, engrossing film, Erice opens with the beginning of a movie-within-a-movie called Triste le Roi (“The Sad King”), a period piece about a wealthy, dying man in France enlisting another man to travel to China to seek out his long lost daughter. We’re told later that Miguel (Manolo Solo), the director of Triste le Roi, intended to make an adventure out of this long-gestating project, but the actor playing the mysterious traveler in the film, Julio (José Coronado), disappeared mid-production. 

That was 1990. In 2012, a TV show in the Unsolved Mysteries vein takes an interest in Julio’s case and Miguel agrees reluctantly to participate, despite the still-lingering pain of losing his best friend and cutting short what remains of his final production. Needless to say, the broadcast revives interest in the actor, who was presumed dead, and steers Close Your Eyes in a much different direction, albeit at the measured pace that Erice carefully sustains. This is premium Old Guy cinema, with Miguel as a stand-in for a director whose own career had seemingly stalled out for good, only to display an unexpected vitality. Much of the film takes place near the seaside and the ambient lapping of the waves functions as a tone-setter, allowing Erice (and the viewer) to contemplate themes of memory, identity, friendship, and family as if breathing in the salty air. 

Movie magic abounds in Close Your Eyes, most memorably in a sequence where Miguel and his friends, relaxing over drinks one peaceful night, get out a guitar and sing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” the ballad sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. The bond that song evokes, familiar to those who rightfully love Rio Bravo, segues into a second half where Miguel comes to terms with what happened to Julio and the blank space that it carved out in his life thereafter. The movie, the movie-within-the-movie, and Erice’s career itself eventually converge in a bittersweet finale that tiptoes to the edge of sentimentality, only to back away just fast enough. Few fades to black are ever this perfect. — Scott Tobias

Close Your Eyes opens this weekend in New York, Chicago, and Toronto. It expands from there.

Blink Twice
Dir. Zoë Kravitz
102 min.

Knives Out meets Get Out meets The Stepford Wives meets the Garden of Eden, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, could not be more tapped into the zeitgeist, dealing as it does with a tech-bro billionaire whose #MeToo issues are themselves grist for the cultural mill. Yet its commercial calculation is at least partially forgivable for Kravitz’s willingness to push her conceit to shocking extremes. If she has to package her nasty provocations in the popular hooks of a mysterious getaway with a star-filled ensemble and a twisty agenda meant to keep the audience guessing, then so be it. The content has to be clickable in order for the malware to work. 

It isn’t often that Channing Tatum, Kravitz’s husband, gets cast as the heel, but his good looks and easy-breezy seductiveness make it plausible that a character like Slater King, a mogul disgraced by lightly detailed workplace abuses, could be a candidate for image rehabilitation. As Blink Twice opens, Slater is holding court at a splashy philanthropic gallery party before retreating to his private island, where he can continue the therapy he needs while ostensibly leading a quiet, organic, sustainable, and downright ascetic life out of the spotlight. He’s an excellent dancer, as anyone played by Tatum would be, and stepping back is part of the public relations tango that he needs to play. Rest assured, Slater King is getting the help he needs. Just ask Slater King. 

The act works on Frida (Naomi Ackie), a waitress at the event who manages to ingratiate herself to Slater, who then invites her and her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) to join his entourage on the island for a vacation. There are a couple of red flags right off the bat—the guests are cajoled into surrendering their phones, and the women have their all-white wardrobe laid out for them—but any misgivings Frida and Jess might have are lost in the ceaseless bacchanal of champagne, haute cuisine, fat blunts, and mind-blowing designer drugs. But even as Frida grows closer to Slater and parties with his entourage and invited guests, the not-rightness of the situation starts to nag a little, from the venomous snakes that are seemingly harvested by the staff to peculiar bruises that are written off as drunken mishaps. 

It’s not necessarily surprising when the shoe finally drops in Blink Twice, but Kravitz and her co-writer, E.T. Feigenbaum, have a few more tricks up their sleeve, and Kravitz is a promising stylist and director of actors. With an eclectic cast of new faces and veterans like Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan, and Haley Joel Osment, Kravitz keeps the party popping, and suggests the tribal phenomenon of everyone saying they’re having a good time while feeling something else. The days and nights bleed into each other to such a degree that the fun literally never ends, funded as it is by Slater’s bottomless pocketbook and notorious indulgence. 

Yet the obviousness of Blink Twice starts to nag, too, as the secrets of the island come into focus and Kravitz’s agenda becomes as imposing as Slater’s. Kravitz scores some good points about the emptiness of public apologies and rehabilitation tours, which a rich guy like Slater has the resources to afford when he’s not simply retreating to a Jeffrey Epstein-esque island estate. Though there’s something to be said about Frida’s willingness to look past the allegations against him, the film is keenly aware of the power imbalance that allows his generosity to be wielded like a cudgel. Kravitz doesn’t leave much for the audience to unpack, save for an ending that twists itself into a confusing knot, and we’re left nodding along at an editorial. It feels as heavy as a hangover. — Scott Tobias

Blink Twice opens everywhere tonight.