Zola

In 27 Octo­ber, 2015, Azi­ah “@_zolarmoon” Wells told a sto­ry. Over the course of 144 tweets, she detailed a falling out between her­self and a woman named Jes­si­ca dur­ing a last-minute road trip from Detroit to Flori­da. Choice details includ­ed a Niger­ian pimp, an emo­tion­al­ly unsta­ble boyfriend, and insights into the real­i­ty of mod­ern sex trafficking.

Twit­ter was nev­er the same after that, and nei­ther was Azi­ah, who found her­self thrown into the spot­light. A pro­file in Rolling Stone fol­lowed, which A24 swift­ly bought the rights to and optioned for a film. But how does one turn a mam­moth Tweet ses­sion into an actu­al movie?

The can­ny folk at A24 turned to direc­tor Jan­icza Bra­vo to helm the project, and she brought in dra­mat­ic wun­derkind Jere­my O Har­ris, recent­ly the toast of Broad­way for his divi­sive, sear­ing the­atri­cal piece on sex­u­al pol­i­tics between inter­ra­cial cou­ples, ​‘Slave Play’. Tapped into the kind of inter­net lan­guage and cul­ture which cap­tured the world’s imag­i­na­tion back in 2015, Har­ris wrote the screen­play with Bra­vo, and then came the impres­sive cast: Tay­lour Paige as Zola and Riley Keough as ​“this bitch” Ste­fanie (a stand-in for Jes­si­ca). They’re joined by Succession’s Nicholas Braun as Stefanie’s long-suf­fer­ing boyfriend Derek, and Col­man Domin­go as her men­ac­ing roommate/​pimp, Z.

Zola wouldn’t work with­out such a great ensem­ble; much like the inter­net phe­nom­e­non it stems from, the mag­ic is in the deliv­ery. Paige is a fan­tas­tic anchor for the insan­i­ty that ensues, pro­vid­ing a mas­ter­class in say­ing absolute­ly every­thing with just a side­ways glance or baf­fled stare. Keough, as the extreme­ly messy Ste­fanie, is a fast-talk­ing, AAVE-abus­ing sex work­er who has lit­tle con­cern for the friend she’s inad­ver­tent­ly involved in her car­nage, much less her dot­ing boyfriend who’s beg­ging her to stop sell­ing herself.

Braun, who is best known as the awk­ward, wide-eyed sweet­heart Cousin Greg in HBO’s Suc­ces­sion, exe­cutes some excel­lent phys­i­cal com­e­dy as Stefanie’s bum­bling beau Derek, while Domin­go is won­der­ful­ly unhinged as the ter­ri­fy­ing Z, who refus­es to let Zola cash out and get far away from Florida.

A lot hap­pens over the course of 90 min­utes, and Bra­vo and Har­ris par­lay the won­der­ful­ly ener­getic pace of Wells’ orig­i­nal writ­ing into a coher­ent script. Ari Weg­n­er and Mica Levi on DoP and score duties respec­tive­ly also deserve a shout-out, adding eye-water­ing flu­o­res­cents and fairy tale harps to height­en the dra­ma. The only real fail­ure is the deci­sion to change the end­point of the sto­ry; the orig­i­nal clos­ing tweet was punchi­er, and the alter­ation bears too much of a sim­i­lar­i­ty to the con­clu­sion of Har­mo­ny Korine’s Spring Break­ers.

But there’s a lot to admire about Zola all the same – it’s a frank and extreme­ly fun­ny account of one wild week­end, approach­ing sex traf­fick­ing in a bold new way as well as exam­in­ing the racial ten­sion between Zola and Ste­fanie. The appro­pri­a­tion of Black cul­ture by white char­ac­ters in the film is obvi­ous and uncom­fort­able but unde­ni­ably hon­est; there are so many women like Ste­fanie and men like Derek.

Yet for all the fun and wild char­ac­ters, it’s a sad sto­ry too, demon­strat­ing the ways women are abused and beat­en down by men to the point they don’t see any way out of the cycle, as well as how ter­ri­fy­ing it can be to just exist as a woman today – let alone as a Black woman, a sex work­er, or both. There’s an unde­ni­able seed­i­ness to Zola, but also a great deal of empa­thy. As a con­tem­po­rary fable about female rela­tion­ships, it works extreme­ly well.

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