‘Zola’ Star Riley Keough Is Her Generation’s Finest Femme Fatale

There’s a certain familiar profile for a lot of contemporary not-quite-movie stars that Riley Keough seems to fit. She comes from a high-profile family (she’s Elvis Presley’s granddaughter!); dabbled in modeling at an early age (first gig: Dolce & Gabbana); and has appeared in some hit movies (Magic Mike; Mad Max: Fury Road) without ever starring in one or becoming a household name. But with so many traditional film genres exiled to indie movies and/or streaming, Keough hasn’t needed blockbuster back-up to develop a clear persona. Her new movie Zola, a Sundance sensation in 2020 finally making its way to streaming this Friday July 23, confirms it: Riley Keough is her generation’s finest femme fatale.

The femme fatale archetype—the seductive, mysterious, irresistible woman who lures other characters (usually men) into danger—pre-dates cinema itself. But this type of character was especially prevalent in 1940s film noir; Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Rita Hayworth in Gilda; Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Keough doesn’t work exclusively in noir or neo-noir, but when she does, it seems to coax those elements further out of the movie in question.

Hold the Dark (currently streaming on Netflix), for example, is a wilderness thriller that feels like a particularly bleak noir whenever Keough is on screen. She’s at her most fatale as Medora, a woman who writes to Russell (Jeffrey Wright), a wolf expert, luring him to Alaska so he can track the wolves that she claims took her young son. She engages in the kinds of manipulations that populate countless noir pictures, only her ultimate goals feel more existential and elusive. Actual wolves don’t spend that much time on screen in Hold the Dark. Instead, it has Medora taking the femme-fatale role into more feral (though still calculating) territory, touching the “chaos and murder” Werner Herzog saw in Grizzly Man.

The Los Angeles mystery Under the Silver Lake is a genuine neo-noir, and gives Keough has a job that could be thankless: She’s Sarah, the beautiful, mysterious neighbor who fascinates and allures the aimless, good-looking creep Sam (Andrew Garfield). Sam and Sarah spend a single evening together—half-idyllic (getting stoned and watching an old movie), half-dirtbaggy (snacking on saltines and orange juice; also, Sam is a dirtbag), and abruptly curtailed—before she disappears, 20 minutes the movie. The next two hours are about Sam traveling down various trash-culture conspiracy rabbit holes looking for her.

This means that Keough isn’t in a lot of Under the Silver Lake—and that she has to create a memorable image that can convincingly haunt the rest of the movie. First and repeatedly seen in a big hat, sunglasses, and bikini, she fits the bill visually, and Sarah has plenty of femme fatale characteristics: supernaturally alluring, so immediately interested in the protagonist as to arouse suspicion, and capable of leading him into a world of violence and mystery. But the movie flips that role into ambivalence. The classic femme fatale draws a man into her world for her own purposes, while here Sam pursues Sarah, making the implicit desire to be drawn into that world painfully explicit, even past the point of her seeming to really exist. Late in the film, when Sam (spoiler alert?) finally locates her, Keough teases out an opaque sense of melancholy over where she’s wound up.

Earthquake Bird (also streaming on Netflix) also uses Keough as disappearing bait. The movie toys with noir formulas by focusing on Lucy (Alicia Vikander) a woman who reluctantly befriends Lily (Keough), a fellow expat living in Tokyo. There’s a love triangle, of sorts, but the most interesting tension in the movie is between Lucy and Lily, especially when it’s unclear whether Lily is manipulative, seductive, or just flaky. There’s something unnervingly nomadic about Lily that’s also a part of Keough’s deal in American Honey, where she plays a conniving den-mother of sorts to a ragtag crew of teenage runaways selling magazine subscriptions all across America.

This brings us to Zola, which similarly has Keough seducing a woman on not-quite-sexual terms. The movie is based on a true story as conveyed through a massive Twitter thread, following the harrowing and darkly funny misadventures of Zola (Taylour Paige), a waitress and sometime exotic dancer who goes on a road trip with a new sorta-friend Stefani (Keough). They’re supposedly heading to Florida for a lucrative night of dancing, but Stefani withholds enough information to put Zola in legitimate danger. Run-ins with pimps, guns, and kidnapping follow.

Based on its wild origin story and fidgety style, Zola seems like it’s going to be manic and punchy—a TikTok come to life. Director Janicza Bravo instead goes hazier and more zonked-out, mixing old media with new: shooting mostly on grainy 16mm film while constantly punctuating scenes with the pings of push notifications. Similarly, the charisma that Keough summons for Stefani isn’t pure femme-fatale seduction. She lures her new acquaintance in with sex-positive female bonding, offering fun, money, and even a dash of budget glamour—as she speaks almost exclusively in the language of cultural appropriation, a white woman affecting a “Black” voice. Is this part of her cultural upbringing, an affectation, or both? (Regardless, Paige’s underplayed reactions to Keough’s more outlandish deployment of Black-cent are priceless.) When the movie takes a mid-action break for Stefani to narrate her side of the story, quoted from a Reddit thread rather than Twitter, she affects a holier-than-thou mean-white-girl purity—a markedly different (and fairly unsuccessful) form of shameless manipulation.

Zola sometimes feels afraid to try to add up to much; the characters are intentionally static and the movie ends abruptly, as if moving too far afield from the original tweets would be sacrilege committed against their found-art qualities. But it gains some meaning through Keough’s other work. Her femme fatales play into regional iconography: In Hold the Dark, she submerges herself—literally, at one point—into the Alaskan wilderness, while her character in American Honey asserts herself with a Confederate-flag bikini. In Silver Lake, she’s a Los Angeles fantasy. Zola turns her into Florida incarnate; that Stefani doesn’t technically live there almost makes her more Floridian, a tourist with short-sighted ambition. The regionalisms, real or imagined, become part of her characters’ mystique—an explanation (or an excuse) that never quite fits. Forget it, it’s Silver Lake. Or Tampa. Or Alaska.

These characters aren’t simply using their image to get what they want; in some of these narratives, the typical male patsy ultimately doesn’t figure into them at all. Rather, Keough updates and obscures the femme fatale role into a complicated unknowability, neither tragic nor villainous. She creates femme fatales who prey, accidentally or not, on how little we know about each other.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.

Where to stream Zola