There’s a throwaway line in “Blink Twice,” concerning a certain knifemaker from Okinawa, that implies the film exists in the same universe as Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill.” Yet Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut exists on a significantly lower rung of the thriller ladder than Tarantino’s two-part martial-arts masterpiece — namely the recent wave of entertainments that pit their heroes against rich sadists, tantalizing the audience with escapist pleasures before peeling back the facade and showing the true horror.

It’s a foolproof formula. The audience can boo the rich villains while vicariously enjoying the indulgences their money can buy: food, marijuana, champagne and endless days lounging in the sun. There’re usually vape and crypto jokes aplenty, and there’s usually an elaborate set filled with eccentric architectural indulgences, which more often than not catches fire. Within this genre, “Blink Twice” ranks a little higher than “Ready or Not” and a little lower than “The Menu.” It’s not the post-modern masterpiece it wants to be, but it’s a pretty good example of one of the early 2020s’ most reliable film formulas.

The protagonist is Frida (Naomi Ackie), a cocktail waitress who stumbles (literally — she’s struggling to walk in heels) into a gala hosted by handsome tech CEO Slater Gray (Channing Tatum). Soon she’s being whisked away to a dream getaway on the mogul’s private island, which allows copious opportunities for the movie to show us close-ups of food being served and champagne being poured while the sound design amplifies the creaking of corkscrews and the crackling of vape pens to claustrophobic levels. This is a showy film, with nearly every shot employing some kind of gimmick.

The audience is quicker to realize than Frida that something is seriously wrong with the island. “Blink Twice” plays its cards close to its chest, spending a disproportionate chunk of its runtime among Frida and her friends as they eat, drink, lounge and doze through endless sunlit days, tantalizing the viewer with cryptic clues and fearful glances from the island’s ominous groundskeepers. The twist is truly horrific once we learn it, unveiled in a series of brief but shockingly brutal flashbacks that justify the trigger warning shown at the beginning of the film.

These scenes stand at a right angle to the earlier humor, which strikes the same notes as a chick-flick parody like “Bridesmaids” or “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” — not to mention the ending, which comes from “Poor Things” by way of “Phantom Thread,” and which is so implausible it feels like a hallucination. For most of its runtime, “Blink Twice” exists so purely on the level of entertainment it’s easy to wonder why the film finds it necessary to show scenes of such raw and disquieting violence. It might’ve been less tonally jarring if it’d played the earlier scenes in more of a minor key, or else let the implications of the island’s secret speak for themselves.

“Blink Twice” isn’t really saying anything about the entitlement of the rich and powerful that we don’t already know from the last decade of headlines (we meet Slater as he’s delivering a half-hearted Instagram apology for an undisclosed past transgression). And Kravitz, a first-time director, has not yet developed the control of humor and graphic content that made “Kill Bill” both exhilarating and potentially traumatizing.

Yet there’s a certain fascination in watching her attack the act of moviemaking with such ferocity. A surfeit of style is better than a lack of one, and there are images that linger in the mind even if the material doesn’t quite deserve them. “Blink Twice” never really transcends its time and genre, but it tries its damnedest, and that’s a lot more interesting than not trying at all.