Oh, Zoe (sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to do the proper ‘e’) Kravitz (the director of this movie) and Channing Tatum (second credited actor of the movie) are engaged. That could give you a new perspective to the movie (but we really shouldn’t read anything into that), especially as apparently they got together during the making of this movie.

Hey, spoilers… But I’ll give you a heads up before we get there.

The movie is about these two young women, Frida and Jess, who “happen” to meet a billionaire at a party and he asks them to join him and his entourage on his private island. On the island everything seems great. They didn’t have any luggage, but there seems to be everything they need. There’s clothes, there’s food, there’s drugs and there’s a locally made perfume which is emphasized from the beginning in such a way that we know immediately that there’s something wrong with it.

After the initial arrival, we see an extended sequence of partying. They get into a rhythm of eating, dosing and other activities. However, while there are implications of intimacy here and there, there is not even an implication of anyone having sex. It seems more like intimacy between friends, but it isn’t really being reprocitated by the women. Of course, these days it’s hard to say whether that’s the modern modesty/puritanism of movies, but based on the concept of the film, it stood out. Then, there starts to be things they forget. At one point Frida has blood on her dress, but when she wakes up it’s gone. Jess is the only one with a lighter and whenever she needs it, it seems to gone.

I really liked the movie. Often movies directed by actors are interesting by default, because if everything else fails, at least they know how to talk to their own, because they know what information they want from the director to do their jobs. However, there is definitely a sure hand behind this film. It manages to straddle the line between believable partying and the unsettling elements in a way where you don’t really know where it’s going even if you know that it’s going somewhere. She also does a great recontextualization of various elements from the movie. It might be a film you might have to see multiple times just to figure out how everything was hinted at. Also, as an actor and a famous person, Kravitz has access to a bunch of people she knows from her time in the business, so they were able to draw in a great cast with a relatively small budget (Variety reported $20 million).

But the movie is not just flashy. It stays with you. Of course this is just he next morning as I’m writing this, but I do expect to think about this movie quite often for a very long time and I do have pretty good instinct on this.

To the actual spoilers:

After a while, Jess disappears, but it takes even Frida some time to notice and others have forgotten she ever was there.

What’s going on is that the men on the island are using the women in the worst possible ways. They are not having sex, because they are raping the women. They just use the perfume to erase memories. It just happens that the local, quite prolific, snake has venom that counteracts the effects of the perfume (which would be an interesting evolution, but also it would be quite likely that things interact in quite specific way with their environment). Jess was killed, because she was bitten by a snake. So, when a cleaning lady (Badass Maid in the credits) gives the venom to Frida as a drink, she starts to remember things and she also gives the venom to the other women.

This leads to the best part of the film. Frida and her newly found ally, Sarah, are stuck on an island with a group of rapists with an armed guard and they can’t let anyone know that they know. They do what they can. They smile, they dance, they partake.

So, Kravitz is famous. Her parents are Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet. She has been around rich people who have expectations of the young, beautiful women around them. Kravitz has likely seen or experienced these situations where a producer or a financier or a director or even a costar feels entitled to a woman (or man, for that matter, although obviously this is less common). I mean, I’m not rich or hang around with rich people, but I’ve seen these situations, where a woman has to balance being friendly and keeping a polite distance from a guy who isn’t respecting her in a way he should. Often these situations would be or could be easily defused with a little bit of honesty from the woman, but at the same time, they know the risk of offending a man, who are generally physically more powerful than the women, so you can’t blame the women.

Another interesting point of view is that Slater, the billionaire, talks in this pseudo-enlightened way, which reminded me of Jonah Hill. Remember last year when his ex-girlfriend released a bunch of messages between the two? Hill was constantly using a specific kind of language to manipulate his girlfriend into certain kinds of behavior and tried to get her not to do certain things she saw as part of her job (like an Instagram feed with revealing images from her job as a surfing instructor) by using similar arguments about his boundaries.

This seems revealing. Is the life among celebrities after #metoo just people trying to find ways to continue doing what they are doing but with a protective sheen of fake deepness?

After the venom finally wakes up the two other women in the group, they lash out against the men and pandemonium ensues. In many ways this is a pretty generic horror movie final scene but just with more characters. Then there’s the twist. Frida manages to get out of a sticky situation by mixing the perfume into Slater’s vaping liquid, so he forgets what’s going on.

There’s a fakeout. We see Frida dragging someone out of a burning building and the initial assumption is that it’s Sarah, but it turns out that she actually saved Slater instead (well, Sarah, being a professional survivor, made it out on her own – I actually really like the character even though she could have easily been very grating).

The final scene is callback to the start of the film. There is a party similar to the one where Frida and Jess originally met Slater (although at this point we know it isn’t true and their memories had actually been suppressed about a previous trip), but now Frida is in charge. She is introduced as the CEO of the fund and Slater is basically her lapdog.

Now, I don’t know how to feel about this ending. Is it Kravitz letting us know that Frida, as the good guy, won and everything is now right in the world, or is it Kravitz hinting at the cyclical nature of abuse and exploitation.

It isn’t delved into very deeply, both Frida and Slater had been victims of abuse of different kinds in their childhoods. Frida had chosen to not think about it while Slater had actively used his resources to block those memories. This implies the latter interpretation of the ending to be correct. Frida overcame the abuse from Slater and chose to continue the abuse, just in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, Kravitz is, once again, famous and her parents are also famous. Indeed, while Lenny Kravitz wasn’t famous in his own right when she was born, he released his platinum-selling debut album pretty soon after and his mother was also a famous actor, and Lisa Bonet had been on the Cosby Show for years at that point. So, Kravitz has never really known the world outside of being rich. So, does she get that being a billionaire is inherently exploitative? Every billionaire has blood on their hands one way or another. And while you can argue that this applies to us as well, as all consumption under capitalism is unethical, there is definitely a different amount of that blood on my hands than on the hands of any random billionaire.

On yet another hand, we have also recently being exposed to how the rich and famous are also being exploited by the people around them. Matthew Perry’s assistant and six other people were arrested for his murder as they conspired to use his addiction to make money out of him, which finally killed caused his death. Similar situation with Michael Jackson’s death, we’ve had reports of allegedly using Kanye’s alleged addictions against him and there’s the “geezer teasers” using people like Bruce Willis to star in subpar movies. And sure, Willis is making money out of them, but if he is having memory issues, is someone around him pushing him to do those?

But again, I liked the movie. I just don’t know about the ending. According to a not-very-insightful story on Business Insider:

“This is not a story about empowerment,” Kravitz said. “This is a story about power.”

Take that how you will.

UPDATE August 31st

As I predicted previously, I have been thinking about this movie a lot and considering that this article has been read quite a bit more than most of the things I publish, I can’t be the only one. And when I say “quite a bit more”, I mean about tenfold.

One of the things that I have been thinking of is the relationship between Frida, our protagonist, and Sarah, a professional TV-survivalist, who is apparently actually competent. When we first meet Sarah, we see her drop a coconut from a tree in a way that could be interpreted as her trying to intimidate Frida in order to get her to back away from Slater.

This feels like one of those things Kravitz is very familiar with: People wanting to pit women against each other. Think Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Aniston vs. Angelina Jolie, Katy Perry vs. Taylor Swift. In the movie, there’s an additional level to this: The ultimate male fantasy (I don’t know how to measure which fantasy would be the “ultimate”, but let’s go with this for rhetoric purposes) of having two beautiful women competing for your attention.

Turns out that there’s nothing to it. The women become immediate allies when they realize they have a common enemy. They even have a discussion about how stupid they were to just travel to a remote island with a bunch of men without thinking twice about it and this is clearly a bonding moment for them. Not in a very positive way, but from that point on any hesitation of working together is gone and they are on very much the same wavelength.

Anyhow, I just thought that this is something in the movie I should have brought up in the text above, but didn’t, so I felt I wanted to fix that.