Mesmerising and monstrous: @zola reviewed

The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of viral tweets — makes a tight, original fist of such material. @zola is A’Ziah ‘Zola’ Wells King, who in 2015 as a 19-year-old exotic dancer and stripper living in Detroit unleashed a 148-tweet thread, billed as #thestory, which detailed a chain of nasty but fascinating events during a surreal trip to Tampa. Full of sex, exploitation, violence and absurdity, it publicly gripped a range of celebrities, including the rapper Missy Elliott and Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles.

The cinematic result is a kind of burlesque comedy thriller, shot with a hazy, fever-dream effect that enhances the weirdness of the brief friendship between Zola (played by the luminous-faced newcomer Taylour Paige) and Jessica Rae Swiatkowski (in the film called Stefani, played by Riley Keough) — a white woman and fellow dancer and stripper.

The action begins with a close-up of Zola and Stefani applying make-up in pole-dancing kit, and Zola’s simple prelude, straight from Twitter: ‘Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.’