Zola

Directed by Janicza Bravo 

Running time: 1hr26 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in Zola

There’s been a recent shift in the film industry toward framing filmmakers as “storytellers”, as if the visual and sensory properties of their art all work fundamentally in the service of narrative. It’s a way to stress the communal, sociable properties of an artform that more and more people choose to consume individually. Storytelling is no more particular to cinema, after all, than it is to literature, music, fine art, and so on. Or indeed social media, which is where Janicza Bravo’s strange, exhilarating Zola steps in: a film that brashly merges traditional and disorientingly new ways of telling stories, and finds both chaos and wisdom in the chasm between them.

Twitter addicts will already know how and why Zola is a milestone. It’s the first film ever to be adapted from a viral Twitter thread, a 148-tweet saga by dancer A’Ziah “Zola” King that, in 2015, racked up thousands upon thousands of retweets from its punchy, instantly meme-able opening salvo: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out?” (That tweet usefully provides the film with both its most memorable line and its marketing slogan.) Cue a wild ride as sometime stripper Zola (played by Taylor Paige) is roped by casual acquaintance Stefani (Riley Keough) into a road trip from Detroit to Florida, ostensibly to make money dancing, though plans soon pivot beyond Zola’s control into sex work, crime and violence.

To some viewers, social media cinema might sound like end-of-days stuff, but Bravo is alive to the sketchiness of the proposition. Zola’s tall, semi-true story might be faithfully and bouncily rendered here — if you know the thread, you know what happens — but that’s almost beside the point. In bringing the fast-and-loose tone of Twitter to the screen, Bravo has made a fascinating, sometimes disturbing study in the disconnect between what’s funny online and in real life, and in the separation of people’s Twitter personae from their real selves. 

Thoughtfully played by Paige, Zola is often a surprisingly quiet, recessive screen presence; it’s more her mouthy voiceover that we recognise from the film’s source. Keough’s white-trash princess Stefani, on the other hand, is always on, always riotous, always that bit larger than life: a consistent character, shaped and controlled by Zola herself. This is storytelling about storytelling, openly unreliable but told with conviction, and now filtered through a filmmaker’s questioning gaze. Rather than opting for video-based vérité, Bravo casts Zola’s story in a dreamy, near-surreal light — tilted and frayed by Ari Wegner’s gorgeously rough 16mm cinematography and the the eerie, inhuman sonics of Mica Levi’s score — and tells one of her own.

ZOLA (2020) Written by Janicza Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris, based on the tweets by A’Ziah King | Shot by Ari Wegner | Edited by Joi McMillon

In cinemas now.