Zola is a vivid and intoxicating descent into social media hell

“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” Thus began a marathon 148-tweet thread from “Zola” (a.k.a. A’ziah King) in 2015 about an unbelievable road trip to Florida with a new stripper friend named Jessica that went horribly wrong. The story became a viral sensation, and now comes Zola, the first feature film adapted from a Twitter thread. While that may signal the start of a frightening precedent, Janicza Bravo’s film is a vivid and intoxicating dive into the allure and dangers of our hyper-connected age. Zola captures the addictive feeling of embarking on a Twitter or Instagram deep dive — you know things won’t turn out well, but you can’t look away.

At least in its earliest moments, Zola closely mirrors King’s epic Twitter thread. Zola (Taylour Paige) is a waitress at Hooters when she meets Stefani (Riley Keough) during her shift. After striking up a quick friendship (they both work as strippers, which is where the similarities seem to end), Stefani pushes Zola to join her on a road trip to Tampa where she insists they can make a quick killing dancing in clubs. Also along for the long trip is Stefani’s meek boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Braun) and her mysterious “roommate” X (Colman Domingo). Once they get to Florida, Zola quickly realizes the truth: X is actually Stefani’s pimp, and alongside stripping, X is along to book clients for Stefani (and he assumes, for Zola).

Despite X’s suddenly threatening behaviour, Zola refuses to go along with his plan and works to actively undermine it. Once she discovers the low rates X is charging clients, Zola sets up her own ads for Stefani at much higher rates. X is initially furious until he sees how much money they manage to pull in in one night. Meanwhile, the group’s escapades catch the attention of Tampa’s underworld, which sets off a violent confrontation that seems ripped right out of the final reel of a Tarantino movie.

Even for those unfamiliar with the initial tweet thread, Zola never lets viewers forget about the overarching influence of social media on these women’s lives. Every moment of their day is spent in front of a phone, either to kill time or to chronicle and shape their public personas. That discrepancy between real life and the composed posturing of Instagram is at the heart of Zola, a film that celebrates the language, attitude, and style of social media posts while constantly underlining the sometimes harsh truths behind what we see online.

While Zola’s story broke because of Twitter, this is really a movie that understands how young people live their lives on Instagram. Texts fly across the screen as the characters communicate with each other, and the bold and saturated visual style of the film seems carefully composed to appeal to people that spend the most time online, living vicariously through the painstakingly curated public lives of others.

Janicza Bravo manages the difficult task of balancing a variety of tones with this film, from a quirky road trip comedy to a dark examination of the lives of sex workers. The wild tonal shifts may not work for everyone, but shouldn’t be a problem for younger generations of hyper-connected folks that can easily sift through grueling social media threads on their phone while binge-watching The Office for the seventh time.

Taylour Paige brings a cautious wariness to her portrayal of Zola — she wants to make money on this strip but she draws a firm line in the sand when it comes to prostitution. That said, she never judges Stefani’s behaviour — she only gets upset when she realizes Stefani is being taken advantage of, and quickly finds a way to support her friend through her dangerous circumstances until they can get out of Florida and Zola can leave this madness behind her.

Janicza Bravo has taken a lurid and far-fetched Twitter thread and turned it into an intoxicating look at an unexpected friendship between two women who present themselves in polar opposite ways. Riley Keough’s portrayal of Stefani with her cringe-inducing appropriated Black mannerisms (a fascinating wrinkle given that she is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) is meant to be grating but acts as a shield to cover up her own personality by taking on the traits of someone else. Meanwhile, Taylour Paige’s version of Zola seems to know entirely who she is at all times and just what she will and won’t put up with, boundaries that Stefani has yet to find.

Like a feminist version of Spring Breakers, Zola seems content to beautifully capture the hilarity and horrors of real life and the ways in which we tweak our circumstances to shape our online personas. After all, we’re all the heroes of our own Twitter threads.

Zola is in theatres now.