Last year at Sundance—the last major film festival before COVID shut everything down for one (1) solid year—Zola was the big divisive hit of the fest. Zola is adapted from that wild Twitter thread about how “me and this bitch here fell out”, which is basically the last time Twitter was fun. Oh sure, sometimes a big boat gets stuck, but the Zola Twitter thread was peak “this app is fun” before it turned into The Hell Site we all know today. Based on the official trailer that just dropped, Zola, the film based on the tweets, captures something of that gonzo, “what is HAPPENING” vibe from the thread. Maybe Zola will remind us how Twitter used to be, and it can be nothing but big boats and messy bitches once again. Or, at least part time. Like give me one messy Twitter bitch a month to make up for all the impending doom.
Zola is directed by Janicza Bravo whose last feature film, Lemon, is NOT for everyone but if you can vibe on its particular frequency of “everyone is awful but THIS GUY is ESPECIALLY awful”, it is a great film (with a hall of fame performance form Brett Gelman, one of contemporary cinema’s great weirdoes). Zola is co-written by Bravo, who also wrote Lemon, and Jeremy O. Harris, who went from setting Broadway on fire to setting Hollywood on fire. Based on the people involved and my bizarro love for Lemon, one of the most challenging films I’ve watched in recent memory, I expect a LOT from Zola. Based on the newly released trailer, Zola is going to deliver, though like Lemon, I don’t expect a 100% approval rating from the audience. I don’t think Janicza Bravo is interested in making movies everyone likes, at least at this particular juncture.
Riley Keough stars as “this bitch” Stefani, and Taylour Paige stars as Zola. They both look fantastic, as does the cast as a whole, including Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun (Succession’s hapless Cousin Greg), and Jason Mitchell. Bravo doesn’t go for the obvious performance, so I am super interested to see what she pulls out of all these great actors. Keough, for instance, already looks to be delivering a next-level nightmare performance. You know what makes my skin crawl? When Keough taps her nails on the window. We’ve all got sounds that make our spines shudder, and I cannot stand the sound of anything scratching on glass. I literally wanted to stop watching the trailer at that point, that is how much I hate that sound. But I also know, because of Lemon, that Bravo is excellent at pushing audience buttons. There will probably be a “glass tapping” moment for everyone at some point. Zola is set to come out on June 30, which actually feels like a thing that might happen this time. I hope so. We need more messy Twitter bitches in our lives.
