86 min | R | June 30, 2021 | A24
A Detroit waitress meets a stranger over a diner counter and agrees to a weekend of dancing in Tampa. The money is real. The trip is something else entirely.
Zola waits tables and dances part-time in Detroit. She meets Stefani across a diner counter and the two click in a single afternoon. Stefani pitches a weekend in Tampa where the dancing pays and the money flows. Zola gets in the car with three strangers. The trip is not a dancing trip. The film adapts a viral Twitter thread into a story about who controls the telling and how fast a glamorous pitch curdles into a trap.
Taylour Paige plays Zola as the only person in the car keeping score. She watches everything and reveals little, and Paige builds the performance on stillness and the precise moment the mask slips. Riley Keough plays Stefani in a blaccent and a permanent grin, a woman who lies as easily as she breathes. Colman Domingo plays X with two voices, a soft American drawl that snaps into a hard Nigerian accent the instant the threat surfaces. Nicholas Braun plays Derrek as a hapless boyfriend who keeps mistaking the situation for a vacation. The four of them form a road trip where only one passenger knows where it is actually going.
Janicza Bravo directs from a script she wrote with Jeremy O. Harris. She shoots the trip in lurid neon and flat Florida sun and treats the strip clubs as both seductive and clinical. The sound design threads the chime of social media notifications through the scenes, a constant reminder that the story is being typed even as it happens. Joi McMillon cuts the film in jagged jumps that mirror a thread unspooling tweet by tweet. Bravo keeps the camera locked to Zola’s point of view and lets the floor drop out at her pace.
This is a film about narration as survival. Zola tells the story because telling it is how she holds on to what happened to her. Bravo refuses to moralize about sex work and refuses to flinch from the danger underneath the comedy. She keeps the laughs and the dread in the same frame at the same time. The result unsettles more than it entertains, and it means to. Zola trusts its narrator completely and never once lets the audience relax.