Now in theaters:
Zola--To be clear, this movie is not a prestige costume biopic on the life of Emile Zola. But that Zola might well have envied the scandalous and scary plot.
There is a literary/cinematic distinction here, however; this may be the first movie ever based on a Twitter thread. The "viral" 2015 saga, which ran to 148 tweets, was the work of Aziah King, aka Zola (Taylour Paige), a beautiful Detroit-based waitress and sometime stripper who, she claims, got invited on a road trip to Tampa by Stefani (Riley Keough), another stripper she had just met at the restaurant where she worked. The plan, or so she thought, was to dance a little, make some money, party a little, come home. It didn't work out that way.
Also on the trip was a mysterious Nigerian man (Colman Domingo) who Zola soon realized was Stefani's pimp, and Derek (Nicholas Braun), Stefani's numb-skulled nominal boyfriend. In a very short time, Zola realized that she had been lured into a sex trafficking ring, and was in serious trouble.
The gifted director, Janicza Bravo, links natural overheard rhythms, like two kids dribbling a basketball, to the rhythms of the editing and music to generate a nerve-jangling, ominous tension. She also creates a cringe-inducing sense of what sex work looks like from the sex worker's point of view, and most intriguingly, a convincing, non-melodramatic sense of how an intelligent person might find themselves caught up in sex trafficking, just like anybody might stumble obliviously into something they don't want to do but can't safely get out of.
Bravo and the actors, led by the self-possessed Taylour Paige, bring this cautionary tale to life, with plenty of harsh comedy but also a very real tone of menace. There is some question about how much the real-life Zola (who is credited as an executive producer) may have fictionalized her account; all I can say is that I was deeply invested in this woman getting away from this situation.
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