Blink

As Rudyard Kipling so insightfully tried to warn us back in 1911, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” and in writer/director Julie Bruns’ new short film, Blink, this is exactly what we find out again.

In the opening moments we find that Lucy (also Bruns) has killed her husband, Bill (Tsakiridis). She tells us through her voiceover that she killed him twenty-seven minutes ago, stabbing him thirty-three times, one for every bruise he ever gave her plus one extra for good measure, but that Bill won’t stop blinking even though he’s dead. This is obviously extremely disconcerting and frustrating for Lucy as she had hoped to escape the horrors of the male gaze when she ended him.

For Lucy, her life, she says, has been some monumental Sisyphean effort to find real love. Unfortunately, the men she has met along the way have fallen short of her romantic ideal, and in some cases have been abusive or violent towards her, meaning that the giant rock of expectation has rolled back down to the foot of the hill and she has had to start again. Of course, for Lucy, this is just more confirmation of the brutal nature of all men, and so she has taken matters into her own hands to ensure that no other woman will be caught trying to push that particular rock up a never-ending hill that has no summit.

In the four-and-a-half minutes, including credits, that Blink has to run there’s not enough space to explore the background or the ins-and-outs of Lucy’s relationships and so we are given the broadest of brush strokes to fill in the gaps that Bruns wants us to focus on. Bill was a bad man; he put his hands on Lucy and hurt her; so now he’s dead; good riddance, Bill. Then we find out that some of Lucy’s past beaus have also disappeared. There’s nothing to say what they did to her, but they’re gone too, so it’s obvious that they deserved it. And so Lucy has to keep pushing that damned rock up that interminable hill.

Both Bruns and her co-director Steven Kammerer do their best to keep Lucy’s story self-contained, with every shot being close-up to its subject and the focus being entirely on Lucy or the man she has despatched. However, the theme being expressed through Blink is one that obviously resonates throughout the wider world. Lucy is just one of countless women who have suffered at the hands of violent or controlling men – it’s just that in her case she has fought back. The problem with Blink though, is that it never decides whether this makes Lucy into a monster herself or if she is the heroine of her own story – and that is dangerous.

There is a definite sense of glee and abandon in the way that Lucy kills Bill, with a strong undercurrent of deserving justification which runs through the story. There’s a sense that Lucy could be an avenging angel meting out judgement to all the male oppressors of the world in a clarion call to women everywhere. Certainly, every man in Blink, on screen or named, is killed by Lucy in an absolute categorisation of their nature which runs very close to being revealed as misandry. Whether or not Lucy is an unreliable narrator, she is never herself categorised as a monster in the way that say, Hannibal Lecter was, leaving her actions to be interpreted as perhaps permissible under the circumstances of her relationships. Similarly, there is not enough explanation or outright tragedy in her story, such as that of The Bride, which would justify her in her decision to Kill Bill.

In interviews, Bruns has said that she would like to explore more of Lucy’s story and perhaps adapt Blink into a full feature, but in order to do that I would suggest that she first needs to work out what alignment of character Lucy truly is. With, in the real world, there rarely being any justification for murder, Lucy’s background and motivations must be spelled out and accounted for very clearly if she is to be allowed to continue her killing spree across two hours of film.