I’ve always disliked Zoe Kravitz. I saw her in Fantastic Beasts but it wasn’t until Big Little Lies that she really got on my nerves. Then there was a commercial for Pepsi or something. Then The Batman and now this, which she kinda wrote and directed.
At first I thought she must have just watched Don’t Worry Darling and copied the plot but that movie came out in 2022 and according to the New York Times’ profile, she started writing this script in 2017, in London, while working on Fantastic Beasts. She wanted to vent her frustration, was how she put it. The actress with no training, but only the good luck of being the daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, and the granddaughter of Roxie Roker (the neighbor on The Jeffersons which was also, I believe, the first interracial couple on television, thanks to Norman Lear,) and Sy Kravitz. In other words, she was born into Hollywood.
And therefore gets all the advantages of Hollywood when it comes to having no experience and just jumping into screenwriting to work out some feelings.
The story is, more or less, two besties and roommates get invited to an island owned by an uber wealthy nothingburger, and once there, start to have strange feelings. The island has a rare flower, found only on that island… HINT… and they are rounding up some “harmless” snakes…. HINT… There is an indigenous woman going around killing the snakes and whose language they can’t understand… HINT… they do a lot of drugs after dinner, but safely… HINT… she finds lots of pictures of previous guests… HINT. A gift in her room is some perfume made only on that island… HINT.
Eventually the indigenous woman has her drink some snake venom and the main character starts to remember the rapes and the attacks and the beatings and so on that the men in the group perpetuated on the women the night before. The snake venom is an antidote to the memory loss caused by the perfume and the flowers.
There is a young guy there who I thought was the token gay but it turns out he is simply a eunuch. He’s also wearing the perfume so he doesn’t remember the other four dudes going at it with the unwilling women and apparently got beaten up for not participating. (Because he’s GAY!)
Apparently, women’s biggest fear, is men making them lose their memories of abuse, rape and harassment. This movie and “Don’t Worry Darling.” Men’s biggest fear is trying to find their buddy that they misplaced while in a blackout state which Bradley Cooper called, “A Great fucking time,” in “The Hangover.” and then again in part 2 and 3, both of which sucked balls.
But my biggest complaint is that the movie was made at all. The script misses on just about every level with the exception, I think, of Simon Rex, one of the male guests, who seems to have learned a lot from his time as a gay jerk off porn star. Christian Slater could be funny at times. I wish he had had a more successful career. But Channing Tatum was an absolute drip and although I’ve never disliked him and even found him fun to watch in the Coen Brothers movie he made, it kind of makes sense that he and Zoe Kravitz are engaged. The lead, Naomi Ackie, is absolutely horribly misdirected at least at the beginning — so much so that I wanted to leave. But Alia Shakwat performs pretty well in spite of the awful script and bad direction. Geena Davis is completely wasted and it’s a real shame. The gay/non gay kid is Levon Hawke, son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Basically the entire movie is a nepotism project and it infuriates me that there are so many people who can write better scripts and directors who are better directors, but then this is the piece of crap that gets made, just because she had issues she wanted to work out at a London cafe in 2017. What? That you’ve been too successful? That every door you want to open is opened for you. Ugh. Now I hate her.