Director: Janicza Bravo Starring: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, Colman Domingo, Jason Mitchell Running Time: 90 minutes
“Every day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is never to be it.” So goes an established adage among Very Online Twitter users (synonym for the depressed), and one worth questioning, isn’t it? From rise and fall celebrity stories, to social media ritual sacrifice, to stories we big up to our mates of some mad one on a mad one, there is an accepted understanding, there is a threshold past which you become a ‘character’, and once that happens, are you still a person? Does everything that happens to you then become on-brand for people’s expectations, do people still see you as a person in the same way? Twitter by its nature imposes limits on character. One leading lady of online who proved an exception to the rule is Aziah “Zola” King, whose long thread about the wild story of how her and “this bitch” fell out captivated readers all the way to the end of a thread, a Rolling Stone article and now, an A24 movie. Suitably shallow as befitting its source material, Zola still uncovers plenty of interesting ideas about power, presentation and identity.
- August 2, 2021
- 2021, A24, August, Colman Domingo, Janicza Bravo, Jason Mitchell, Nicholas Braun, Riley Keough, Taylour Paige, Twitter, Zola
