The “All this happened, more or less” of sex worker cinema.

The original tweet reads a little bit differently, mostly because of punctuation. A’Ziah King starts us with “Y’all,” not “You.” The “and” is an ampersand. There are an additional seven question marks, which, given the plot of Zola, is entirely warranted. And then there are two emojis after “suspense,” which are a little hackneyed now but which make enough sense in context that I’m not mad about it. These are condensed into this line by speech and by intonation, and what results is, by my math, the best opening line of any American movie in more than two decades. Credit is owed to the screenwriters, but more power to A’Ziah King for absolutely nailing this thing in under 140 characters.

I’ve only got one quibble with this line, and that’s with the “kind of long” thing. 148 tweets in a thread is a lot, and I recognize that the filmmakers wanted to be faithful to the first tweet (for good reason!), but Zola does not feel even kind of long. The movie is only ninety minutes. It’s a movie totally content with its own brevity because there are enough discrete events in Zola to keep Roman Jakobson busy for a fortnight. The hater in me (Spider-Man pointing, “it’s the same picture,” whatever) looks at Zola and its flurry of happenings in an hour and a half and compares it to the last two Best Picture winners. If CODA, which is a little shy of two hours, is full of discrete events, then so too is High School Musical. Everything Everywhere All at Once, which blows past the two hour mark, is full of purposefully muddled events in order to give the impression that more happens than actually occurs. Zola, in less time, does far more with its story. Perhaps, like a good essay, it’s because it has a thesis statement that both of those other movies amble around trying to find.

That first sentence is doing so much story work, and the second twists it and troubles it. In the first sentence, the story is a fait accompli. Zola and the bitch fall out, Charles Foster Kane dies having said a single mysterious word, Walter Neff sweats into a dictaphone. In the second sentence, it’s no longer about the fallout but the wild events which lead to the fallout, and then to the many, many wild events which follow that fallout. It wasn’t about Zola and Stefani and Derrek (three perfectly cast characters, maybe Succession will end with Nicholas Braun getting access to the nuclear arsenal so Cousin Greg can vaporize Liechtenstein on a dare) but about escalation in grimy hotel rooms with bad bright lighting.