Review: Zola Is a Brilliantly Rowdy Comedy About the False Intimacy of Social Media

Janicza Bravo’s Zola is adapted from A’Ziah “Zola” King’s 148-tweet tale of a Florida road trip from hell, as well as a subsequent Rolling Stone article by David Kushner. It’s an unusual origin that, considering the affected compositions and easy social satire of her 2017 film Lemon, seems to have turbocharged Bravo’s creativity. Every moment in Zola pulsates with life, as Bravo fuses seemingly incompatible tones and styles to capture the wild mood swings of her protagonists in states of emotional and physical extremis, in turn freeing her actors to boldly plumb their characters’ hidden and idiosyncratic depths.

Unlike most recent, culturally fashionable films concerned with systemic biases, which work from the outside in, clinging to an obvious theme, Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves. Think of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience with the swing of Sean Baker’s Tangerine and you’re halfway there, though Bravo goes further than either of those films.

Zola opens on a hypnotic image of two women—one white, one black—made up and scantily dressed and gazing upon one another against a hall of mirrors. They’re strippers, and at first glance they seem to be reflecting their mutual narcissism back to one another. More specifically, they’re basking in the performative cocoon that they’ve erected to wall themselves off from the relentless speculation and pawing that their profession demands.

Sexual exhibition work is an extreme example of satiating a needy and unsympathetic public in a brutally commercialized world, but Zola understands that these demands exist subtly in other lines of work as well, particularly the service industry, which also requires force of will and distance from minute-to-minute pressure. One way to achieve such distance is through social media, and the black woman, Zola (Taylour Paige), tells us in voiceover tweets that we’re about to see how she fell out with her white partner in crime, Stefani (Riley Keough).

Except that Zola doesn’t voice her frustrations so politely. Bravo and Slave Play author Jeremy O. Harris’s screenplay teems with musically obscene dialogue, boldly unhampered by politically correct skittishness and embodying another performative aspect of the film’s characters. Zola and particularly Stefani often speak in, well, Twitter-speak, which is sometimes so insular that we’re provided with English subtitles by way of translation. Correspondingly, the film’s intimate iPhone images have the distorted, feverish colors and filtered polish of TikTok videos. The raw beauty of the digital imagery here is redolent of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which is tellingly referenced by Stefani at one point in the film.

One of Zola’s most uncanny images is an eerily prolonged shot of two boys dribbling a basketball on the balcony of a low-rent motel while Zola, Stefani, and their crew unpack in the parking lot. The boys dribble with an exactness that implies an awareness of being watched, as if they think they’re in a video, and such knowingness hints that Zola and Stefani are about to enter a world more dangerous than they know. Such details—the syncopated tapping of long fingernails, a car singalong staged as a rap video—continue to pop up, suggesting that we’ve entered an alternate realm that fuses social media-mandated illusions with physical reality.

Zola, once a waitress, has followed Stefani into stripping and continues along with her to Florida for a weekend with a mysterious man (Colman Domingo) and Stefani’s boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun), where the women are supposed to strip for massive amounts of money. The truth is that Stefani is a sex worker and the mystery man, billed as X, is her pimp—a fact to which even Derrek is willfully oblivious. The two men are an amusingly reductive study in contrasts. X is jacked and stylish with more than a hint of real danger; his accent even changes when he loses control, suggesting just how much of his behavior is a put-on. Meanwhile, Derrek is a thin and pitiful and none-too-bright tagalong whom Stefani seems to date for his easy gullibility (she, so often manipulated, needs someone she can control). This contrast, especially in light of a prostitution scam, feels extremely volatile, as Zola and Stefani must satisfy various deranged men merely to get out of the weekend alive.

Though the film is profoundly empathetic to the plight of women like Zola and Stefani, it’s often staged as a go-for-broke comedy. Bravo doesn’t condescendingly position Zola and Stefani as martyrs in service of a feminist sermon, but rather sees them as upstart capitalists looking to take control of their “product,” in this case their bodies. The matter-of-fact, satirical acceptance of this cynical point of view is poignant, and in a resonant and uncomfortable twist, Zola turns out to be a better pimp than X, commandeering Stefani’s marketing online to sell her friend for higher rates while avoiding the bedroom gymnastics herself.

Bravo’s handling of the sex scenes is detailed and restrained. Throughout the film, we see very little of Stefani’s body, as the camera favors the physical vulnerability of the men, including their shy penises and stock sexual positions. One moment in a montage, in which several men are relieved simply to have their shoulders touched, is particularly and extraordinarily intimate. Underneath the film’s stylish sheen, then, is both a parody of and homage to the seductive falseness of social media. Bravo sees the frailties that people try desperately to obscure, which is signaled in that very first image of two people-slash-products retreating into themselves as they weather public scrutiny. Somehow this pathos doesn’t soften Zola’s audacious sense of humor. Instead, these elements intensify one another, underscoring a rich and multitextured world that’s off its axis and for sale to the highest bidder.