Critics reviews

Like Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 Hustlers, Zola shines a light on female sex workers, who are so often misrepresented and/or marginalised in film. And thanks to the strength of King’s voice, Zola feels even more authentic: a significant feminist work that’s as entertaining as it is educational.

It’s a high-wire act that the director Janicza Bravo largely pulls off, challenging you to enjoy what is a fundamentally bleak, unedifying story of abuse.

Bold and intricate in its construction, it possesses the same consciously offhand manner of someone typing in 140-character chunks. Its soundtrack not only consists of Mica Levi’s haunting melodies, but also a Greek chorus of chirping Twitter notifications.

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.

The sensational embellishments of #TheStory recommended itself to the surrealist approach of Bravo, which she employed for her 2017 feature debut Lemon and again for this fever-dream escapade exposing the darker corners of US life. For as much as this is a black comedy designed to amuse and titillate, it is also a damning indictment of a society that frequently leaves women at the mercy of the whims of disreputable men.

This is a movie that takes care to exploit, not the storyteller herself, but the cacophony of ideas at stake in her testimony... Zola makes you feel the itchy, uncomfortable gap between a tweet thread and life as Zola lives it for the span of this story. It heightens the banal in the way that our digital selves — replayable, retweetable, readymade to doomscroll, pliant in the way that all fiction is pliant — heighten the banality.

Through Zola, we see a glimpse of the perennial conflict between Black women and women like Stefani, who have zero qualms steeping themselves in Black culture for their own benefit without actually respecting the women they attempt to emulate. Though hijinks largely drive King’s story, Bravo doesn’t allow the viewer to lose sight of Stefani’s gift for manipulation and the ways she weaponizes her whiteness to evade accountability.

But for how smart the film can be, it also feels somewhat abbreviated... Then again, that, too, is the nature of Twitter: 140 characters (280, now) is rarely enough to contain the full picture. But the ingenuity that Bravo brings to the direction and the electricity that every actor brings to the material make that an easy shortcoming to breeze past, at least for the film’s duration.

Zola’s comic absurdities are entwined with its horrors in a way that almost shouldn’t work. But Bravo—who co-wrote the script with actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris—shows a lightness of touch in navigating the story’s quicksilver tone shifts, and the movie’s two leads bring their best...

Zola is such a breathless ride that by the time the characters are driving over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the silence is almost a welcome reprieve. There are so many layers to the story – from the social media culture that launched it to fame in the first place, to the potent racism and sexism the title character faces. You may already know how the tweets end, but the story is given vivid life and new surprises with cinematographer Ari Wegner’s sun-bleached colors and the cast’s erratic performances.

In the end, Zola is meant to be a construct as much as anything else. It also reflects the form of Twitter. What threads have we read, even the best ones, that haven’t tailed off in asides? In any case, in marrying the language of social media with cinema, Zola is a blinding success whose brilliance will only reveal itself more over time.

Bravo skims the surface with impressive control and a great deal of visual wit and, every so often — as with a shot of a Confederate flag — gestures toward deeper, unrealized ideas.