You can take Zola out of the internet, but you can't take the internet out of Zola. Or maybe you could, but why would you ever want to? Directed by Janicza Bravo, the cinematic adaptation of the 148-tweet thread by Aziah "Zola" Wells embraces its online roots, adopting the internet as an aesthetic.
The passage of time is marked by a clock that looks exactly like the one on the lockscreen of your iPhone, the whistle of a Twitter notification punctuates a scene, characters read their texts to each other like they're talking. The dialogue is heavy in the black slang that tends to become appropriated as Extremely Online slang once they filter out of black communities into non-black ones. Sometimes, Zola says directly to the camera what you know she'll tweet about it later.
Zola embraces its online roots, adopting the internet as an aesthetic.
Zola, as you may realize if you've read the viral 2015 thread, follows its protagonist (Taylour Paige) on a bizarre weekend trip with a fellow stripper she's just met, Stefani (Riley Keough); Stefani's clueless boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun); and Stefani's mysterious "roommate," X (Colman Domingo). The trip is pitched to Zola by Stefani as an opportunity to make some easy money dancing in Tampa, but quickly turns into something much stranger and darker.
Bravo, working from a screenplay she wrote with Jared O. Harris, constructs a film that has more on its mind than just relaying a fun anecdote, but still manages to be as laugh-out-loud funny and nail-bitingly wild as Wells' original Twitter tread was, starting with that indelible opening line: "You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out?"
As played by Paige, Zola makes for an appealing audience surrogate. She comes across as reserved, not least because she's found herself stuck with three strangers who seem liable to do something extremely dangerous or extremely stupid at any given moment, but conveys as much with a careful lack of expression as any explosive line reading could.
She's well complemented by Keough, who synthesizes Stefani's brash confidence, kittenish sex appeal, and aggravating insincerity into someone we don't quite understand, but can't stop watching. And Braun is a scene-stealer, bringing Cousin-Greg-by-way-of-Pete-Davidson energy to poor guileless Derrek.
But Zola keeps its leads, especially Stefani, at an arm's length. The stylistic choices that make the movie feel so internet-y also bring with them the filtered quality of a social media feed. In the same way that browsing someone's Twitter profile isn't the same thing as knowing them in person, watching Zola doesn't feel quite like experiencing Zola's weird weekend, and the emotions it sparks feel muted as a result.
Zola is operating on a level more aesthetic and cerebral, using these quirks to tell a parallel story about the stories we tell about ourselves on the internet, inviting us to consider who's framing them, and how, and why, and to what end.
"Who you gonna be tonight, Zola?" our heroine asks herself in a dreamy mirror montage (one of several). She's getting dolled up for a night of making money off of the fantasies she projects through her body, her bearing, her costumes. But the carefully curated images, the self-conscious posing, the process of trying on and discarding several different personas to see what sells: You might as well be looking at anyone's Instagram feed. And I mean that as a compliment.
