Zola – Film Review

Aziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige), a Detroit waitress, is seduced into a weekend of stripping in Florida for some quick cash — but the trip becomes a sleepless forty-eight-hour odyssey involving a nefarious friend, her pimp, and her idiot boyfriend.

Have you ever watched a film that you fully recognize was extremely well-made, but for whatever reason, you just couldn’t get into it? Perhaps the film had some seriously striking imagery and had a very distinct flair to it that you just couldn’t help but appreciate. Maybe the cinematography was amazing and the outfits were dazzling. The editing was fluid and almost unnoticeable.

But, at the end of the day, you just couldn’t help but shrug at the end and think “meh”. That’s exactly how I felt after watching Janicza Bravo‘s Zola, which is based on a viral Twitter thread back in 2015 by a woman named Aziah “Zola” King as well as the resulting Rolling Stole article titled “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted”.

The greatest ever? No, I don’t think so. As mentioned earlier, I absolutely adored so many of the technical elements on display here, but when you really boil down the story, not much of real intrigue happens and it left me feeling quite cold. Nothing about the film riveted me.

The only truly good scenes don’t occur until about the final twenty minutes, and of course, by that point, it’s all just too little too late. Zola is a film that takes a long while to get going, despite the fact that it runs at an extremely brisk ninety minutes including credits. It’s a bit unclear as to where things are going to go, even if you have read the true story behind the film.

Scenes just sort of happen and you’re supposed to simply sit there and appreciate it. But I simply couldn’t. We barely get to know our lead character Zola at all, and the same thing can be said about the supporting characters too such as Riley Keough‘s Stefani. Seriously, who is she? By the time the film comes to an end, you won’t know the answer to that either.

There are so many instances in Zola where I felt as though I was watching a film that quite literally did not have a story. Picture the same gorgeous aesthetic of Euphoria but without any story injected in there. Sure, you’re looking at something that is visually dazzling and it’s an arresting watch in that way, but in every other way, it falls flat.

Taylour Paige delivers a terrific performance as Zola, but, again, I didn’t really feel as if I got to know her by the end of the story. Riley Keough is wonderful as she always is, and the same can be said about Nicholas Braun as Derrek. The editing is superb. You barely notice when scenes naturally flow from one to the next.

And don’t even get me started on that beautiful cinematography by Ari Wegner – it’s truly one of the best-looking films of the year. But aside from that, Zola didn’t do absolutely anything for me. You can make a bad movie look extremely pretty, but you can’t make it any good story-wise if the script is lacking.