There have been movies based on TV shows, books, plays, video games, and board games. So, why not a Twitter thread? That’s the hook behind Zola or @Zola if you go by the movie’s title. A slightly fictionalized account of a weekend gone hellishly wrong as told by A’Ziah “Zola” King on her Twitter account back in 2015. Or, if you want to be really accurate, it’s based on a Rolling Stone article written by the 148 tweet story Zola told on her Twitter account that ended up going viral, and even she admits she embellished a few things for the sake of humor.
That said, while there’s some humor injected into the story, the underlying tale here is more horrifying than funny in its implications. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, but now that I have seen it, I have a few thoughts.
Zola (Taylour Paige) is waiting tables in Detroit one night when she meets Stefani (Riley Keough). The two both work as strippers and hit it off almost instantly. The following day, Stefani asks Zola if she’d like to go to Florida with her to make a lot of money dancing in Tampa. Zola agrees and the following morning gets in a car with Stefani, Stefani’s rather pathetic boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Braun) and Stefani’s “roommate,” a man who never really shares his name with Zola right away, referred to mostly as X (Colman Domingo). However, the long trip to Tampa soon shows Zola having second thoughts, none she states out loud, but it does become clear very quickly that this trip may not have been the best of ideas. Things only really get worse as time passes, particularly as X, a man who sometimes has an accent of some kind does not turn out to be the nice, laid back guy he initially portrayed himself to be.
What follows in this brief but stylish 90 minute movie is a weekend from Hell for Zola who realizes very quickly she wants to get out of there fast, but that won’t be easy. This is a trip that will involve threats, intimidation, sex, and potential violence. Zola has no issues with stripping, but she has a line she won’t cross and not everyone is fine with her reluctance. As Stefani tries to manipulate Zola to stick around, X threatens her, and Derek just can’t get anything right, Zola will need to keep her head on her shoulders through it all.
I know I kept things a bit vague there in the above paragraph, but honestly, I wasn’t sure how much to say. True, it’s based on a Twitter thread that anyone could look up at anytime, but there’s something to be said for going in to this one with as little firsthand knowledge as possible even if I was able to guess what was coming up to a point. But this movie is also at times rather funny. Zola may not be interested in all of Stefani’s activities, but that doesn’t mean she won’t comment on them, and Derek’s overall uselessness shows he can’t really get much of anything right while trying really hard to do something for the woman he loves even if she may or may not deserve it. That much of this movie is told from Zola’s perspective and is based on Zola’s story will suggest a certain amount of bias (something the movie plays with rather well in one very memorable moment), it helps to remember the real Zola has an executive producer credit on this movie. That’s not a bad thing, as the end result is still a movie that is alternating between funny and frightening, but it is worth remembering all the same that this is mostly Zola’s story as told by Zola.
It certainly helps that Paige totally nails the part. Her growing disquiet before things even truly go to hell is shown with just a look on her face, and she manages to hold her own even as she is still essentially powerless next to the master manipulator that is Domingo’s X. There’s a lot the movie doesn’t say, and for what it is worth, I would recommend looking up the Rolling Stone article which reached out to the real life inspirations for the other characters to find out what happened to some of them and what they do and don’t agree with. If nothing else, Zola uses its humor to point out a very awful real world problem and how perhaps we as a country don’t quite recognize how it even goes down.
Grade: B
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