“Love means never having to apologize,” someone once said in a movie. In 1970, that phrase made no sense at all, but it makes even less sense today. In the last few decades, apologizing has become all the rage.

So when Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice opens with her protagonist, tech mogul Slater King, sitting on a TV couch saying “I’m sorry” for an inexplicable offense, it’s a familiar scene. Choose your offender, choose your year: A famous person ritually apologizes, disappears from the scene for a while (in this case to a remote island with chickens), and returns, presumably forgiven. We’ve seen it all before.

Not that the film isn’t fun to watch – especially because Channing Tatum is so wonderfully and charmingly smarmy in the role. “Blink Twice” is a big step for him as an actor and an even bigger one for Kravitz, his partner, as director and co-writer of this stylish, ambitious and exciting film that aspires to be a gender-bending “Get Out” or a #MeToo-era thriller with echoes of “Promising Young Woman.”

And Kravitz almost pulls it off. With the help of a great cast, she offers strikingly confident, cheekily entertaining cinematography until it all seems to collapse in a mess of porous storytelling. The problem isn’t the sudden intrusion of blood – this is a horror film, sure. It’s the sudden disappearance of logic. You might not be able to turn away – but unlike the aforementioned Jordan Peele or Emerald Fennell films, you won’t necessarily be able to explain what you saw, either.

But it’s certainly great fun, until it’s not – and that’s a pretty apt description of Frida’s (Naomi Ackie, excellent) experience. Frida is a cocktail waitress who designs nail art and lives in a run-down apartment with her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat). When the pair get a job as waitresses at a charity event, they cleverly plan to dress up in seductive dresses in the middle of it all so they can mingle with the wealthy guests.

It turns out to be a fundraiser for Slater’s company, and when Frida stumbles, it’s the billionaire himself who helps her up. He introduces her to his friends, and soon Frida and Jess can’t believe their luck – they’re on Slater’s plane, en route to his very own fantasy island.

The water sparkles. So does the champagne. Frida and Jess’s closets are filled with resort wear in stylish white, matching the attire of the other female guests: the unreliable and/or stoned Camilla and Heather, and the tough-talking, sharp-elbowed Sarah, who has her eye on Slater and is reaching out to Frida. (Adria Arjona’s Sarah is by far the film’s most convincing performance.)

The food, prepared by Slater’s pal Cody (Simon Rex), is impeccable. (His other pals are played by Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke, and his therapist is Kyle MacLachlan.) Alcohol is plentiful, the sheets are soft and there are drugs too – which Slater says are meant to be consumed “on purpose,” whatever that means. The days are long, the nights even longer, and soon no one knows what day it is anyway.

But why exactly is that? Well, all the phones were confiscated upon arrival by Stacy, Slater’s dimwitted assistant – Geena Davis, who, while funny, is a bit underused (and you should never underuse Geena Davis). But there seems to be something deeper at play. We’re trying to avoid spoilers, but as Jess Frida says, “There’s something wrong with this place.”

That would be easy to figure out just by looking at the strangely scary faces of the resort staff (shades of “Get Out”), who are surely hiding something. Also, why does Frida have dirt under her fingernails? And what happened to a red stain on her dress? Strange things happen.

But Frida is still angry that Jess is hesitating. They are on a beautiful island and someone important is courting her. “For the first time in my life, I am here and not invisible, so please,” she admonishes her friend.

And so the pretense continues – that familiar pretense in the Instagram age of always having fun. “Are you having fun?” Slater asks more than once. “Yes!” says Frida, becoming less and less convincing as time goes on.

And when everything is in bloody chaos, someone eerily says, “There’s a version of this where we all have fun.”

There’s a deeper undercurrent here. Women, says Kravitz, are always expected to smile, play the game, pretend to be having fun – and, as she says, “forget” the bad things. And so forgetting is an important element in her film that we won’t give away here.

In any case, there is actually a version of Kravitz’s film that we all enjoy — at least for the most part. She just has to stick the landing. We’re all excited to see what comes next.

“Blink Twice,” an Amazon/MGM release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong violence, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references.” Running time: 103 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.