Zola, the new film from Janicza Bravo (the droll, minimalist Lemon), has its roots not in a novel, a story, or a play but in a thread of tweets. It is, to my knowledge, the first film of its kind.

A’ziah “Zola” King notoriously took to Twitter in 2015 to come clean about a wild 48 hours. Her story has since been taken off the platform, but you can read it here. Briefly told, she meets a white woman (while serving her as a waitress at Hooters) with whom she discovers a shared love of stripping. This woman, to her surprise (they haven’t known each other long, after all), invites her to Florida for a weekend of dancing and money making. They are accompanied by this woman’s boyfriend and by a man she says is her roommate. This trip is not quite what it seems and becomes a dangerous, sometimes violent, journey down the rabbit hole. Zola, however, comes out on top, and she tells the story better than I can. 

Bravo co-wrote the script with playwright Jeremy O. Harris (of the brilliant, justly accoladed Slave Play). In the press notes, Bravo and Harris speak to their investment in how Zola took a situation rife with classic male abuses of power (watch the film or read the thread and you will see), then twisted this situation to her own advantage, both in the way she handled it and in how she told and reframed it on Twitter. Zola is played by Taylour Paige, who has proven herself to be a strong actor both in good films (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) and in the abysmal, Boogie. In short, there is plenty of talent behind this film and plenty of reasons to approach it with excitement. 

Its strengths include an arresting, sometimes humorous frankness about the nude male body and a similarly blunt depiction of naked male entitlement. There is also a strong, vulnerable performance from Nicholas Braun and a potentially fascinating dimension in how Stefani (Riley Keough), as Zola’s new best friend, appropriates Black culture to duplicitous ends. Yet, it doesn’t quite work. 

Zola is most generously described as a sort of fascinating mess. There is plenty of material in the story to make a good film, whether the tale was first revealed on Twitter or elsewhere. While it is clearly a story that excites their imaginations, Bravo and Harris have failed to create something consistently compelling out of it. “All style no substance” is a cliché I would prefer not to use, but the writing, directing, and acting all linger too much on the surface.

So often we find ourselves watching music video-esque sequences with booming music or a stylized montage in which Zola views her changing image in a shifting wall of mirrors, which signals a possible exploration of the multiplicity of self that the film fails to undertake. Furthermore, much of the film is deeply redundant, including drawn-out scenes that reiterate everything we have already learned about the characters. 

The majority of whom come across as little more than caricatures, and the filmmakers do not seem especially interested in Zola. She falls into a dangerous, unpredictable situation, but for the most part, we don’t really have a sense of how she experiences it, other than how she views all involved parties with a detached skepticism and impatience. This is not believable, considering the level of danger and duplicity she finds herself in.

In her voice-over, Zola warns the audience that her tale is “full of suspense.” In real life, I’m sure it was, but not so on screen. Throughout these 48 hours, Zola dramatically adjusts her tactics for survival in a way that Bravo and Harris did not convincingly write and which Paige does not convincingly portray. As a result, her adventure feels quite tame and underwhelming. 

No story can succeed on notoriety alone, and Zola’s is one that demands a deeper treatment than these artists gave it.