Zola

ZOLA   **1/2

Janicza Bravo

2020

IDEA:  Zola, who works as a stripper and waitress in Detroit, gets in over her head when she takes an impulsive road trip to Tampa with her new friend Stefani.

BLURB:  Increasingly, filmmakers have taken on the task of cinematically reproducing the visual idioms of social media, integrating into their films’ formal designs texting iconography and digital-style interfaces. It comes as something of a surprise that Zola, which has its genesis in a viral Twitter thread, is largely devoid of such devices. Outside of its soundtrack of dinging phones and the occasional diegetic screen, the film feels oddly detached from the medium through which its story was initially delivered. In effacing so much of the original mode of communication, the script by Bravo and Harris offers a fairly straightforward dramatization of events, emphasizing the escalating absurdity and danger of the circumstances in which Aziah “Zola” King finds herself over one nightmarish weekend. Bravo is less interested in how her perilous tale was consumed and shared in the online space than in how the events themselves illuminate the virulent realities of contemporary American racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. She is especially effective at sowing an atmosphere of clammy unease, making nocturnal Florida streets and homogenized chain hotels alike into sites of pronounced societal tension. This looming menace is more engaging than the characterizations, which feel overly attenuated despite the fiercely committed performances. What is perhaps most compelling is not anything in Zola itself, but what its very existence implies: a victimized woman taking control of the narrative with strength and irreverence, emerging as not only a storytelling sensation but a tenacious survivor.