zola | the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: @zola

Posted on June 29, 2021 by Darren

The opening line of @zola is inevitable.

“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this b!tch here fell out?” asks Aziah King, the “Zola” of the title. “It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” There was simply no other way that the film was going to start. The line was foregrounded in the movie’s first trailer, and of course it was the opening tweet of the viral twitter thread (#TheStory) that inspired this cinematic adaptation. To put it simply, there was never any way that @zola was going to open any other way.

#NoTimeForReflection

However, the opening line is also a statement of purpose and a key to the film’s central joke. @zola positions that opening salvo as an iocnic statement of itself, a millennial riff on “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and “call me, Ishmael.” The central conceit of Janicza Bravo’s adaptation of the twitter thread is to treat the work like a piece of some modern literary canon, a snapshot of modern America filtered through the prism of art, captured 140 characters at a time. It’s a clever approach, and the best part of @zola is how eagerly it commits to that wry framing.

@zola is an impressive piece of craft, a collision of a very classical formalism with a more modern sensibility to create something that exists in a striking and imaginative space. However, there are times when @zola commits too heavily to studying its characters through the prism of social media, making them feel more like macabre exhibits in some twenty-first century freakshow than actual human beings. Still, @zola sets out to capture an extremely online aesthetic and it largely succeeds – for better and for worse.