'Marupok A+' & Co: Are Movies Based On Twitter Threads Any Good?

(SPOT.ph) I bet when you read a tweet, you’re not thinking, “This is fine, but what I really want is the movie.”  Well, with the premiere of Quark Henares’ Marupok A+: Where Is the Lie? (formerly Marupok AF: Where Is the Lie?) at last year’s Cinemalaya and its entrance into regular exhibition this week as an Ayala Malls exclusive, you may well have to change your tune.

That’s because Marupok A+ makes it official—after Zola (2020) and Dear David (2023), this celluloid dramatization of an elaborate catfishing scheme told over a series of tweets is the third entry in a new cinematic subgenre: films adapted from Twitter threads.

In a way, these films hark back to a nostalgic time for Twitter, back when there was still space for wacky stories on the platform, before it became the cesspool of right-wing disinformation and hate it is now. So where does Marupok A+ fall in the spectrum of quality in this fledgling subcategory?

Zola is the best.

Directed by Janicza Bravo from a script co-written with Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris, Zola is based on a riveting 2015 Twitter thread posted by waitress/part-time stripper A’ziah King (Taylour Paige) and the resulting article published in Rolling Stone about a profanity-laced, hair-raising and hilarious weekend stripping job that A’ziah took in Tampa with a dubious frenemy named Stefani (played by Riley Keough with demented, wannabe street cred that should give Justin Timberlake’s Black affectations a run for its money).

The film gives credence to the idea that the first is still the best: Zola captures the syncopated rhythms of tweets strung together with its fast-paced editing and zingy sense of storytelling. Best of all, Paige’s reserved performance perfectly embodies the feisty voice of her real-life counterpart, her cool refusal to be overwhelmed or fall victim to all the insanity playing out around her. And believe me, there is a lot of insanity: from gun-wielding pimps to sketchy male clientele to suicidally clingy boyfriends. Even Quentin Tarantino could not have come up with a caper more Tarantino-esque.

Dear David is the worst.

Over the course of summer 2017 into early 2018, former BuzzFeed cartoonist Adam Ellis documented on his Twitter account the ghost of a disfigured child allegedly haunting his Brooklyn apartment. The bump in his social media following eventually allowed him to gain enough clout to launch a career writing graphic novels. His ex-employer BuzzFeed also tried to use his Twitter thread to launch its foray into film production—to less stellar results.

That’s because the film adaptation directed by John McPhail from a bone-headed script by Evan Turner and Mike Van Waes truly does not get what made Ellis’ thread so creepy: its open-ended chills and refusal to explain its menacing vignettes. Instead, the film tries to give its inscrutable villain a motivation and backstory, robbing it of its supernatural mystique. There’s even a sequence where our protagonist (Augustus Prew) becomes part of a video game during the climax because...I don’t know...Gen Z? Dear David is a poison letter to followers of the original thread and horror fans everywhere.

Marupok A+: Where Is the Lie? is...just okay.

Remember when Cat Arambulo got scored by netizens for whining “God, why don’t you motherf*ckers just stay at home?” Or when Koko Pimentel was condemned by Makati Med for accompanying his pregnant wife to the hospital "despite being a person under investigation for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)"? Of all the social media controversies that defined the early days of the lockdown, I will wager that none had more complexity than the catfishing saga that unfolded over Twitter involving a transgender interior design student (EJ Jallorina), a hunky, self-professed art director (Royce Cabrera), and the commercial director that orchestrated the whole thing (Maris Racal).

What makes the whole thing even more layered is that all the parties involved got to air their accusations and counterpoints over social media. And this is where Quark Henares’ film adaptation (from a script written by him and John Bedia) eventually stumbles: In the film’s eagerness to capture the three-sided points of its central triangle, it barely pauses to take stock of which viewpoints are most valuable to show.

At its heart, Marupok A+ is a story about the dangers society poses to transgender and non-binary individuals. Because society doesn’t understand or has no window into the lives of people who don’t conform to gender norms, it often “others” these people and violently victimizes them. But instead of laying out these dangers in truly empathetic ways—choosing to portray transgender Janzen’s tribulations in romantic comedy terms—Marupok A+ does the disservice of allowing its audience to hold onto its misguided assumptions until almost the end.

Worse, in devoting so much time to the mastermind of the catfishing scheme, the film ends up making its villain an anti-hero. Abetted by a magnetic performance from Racal, the film even has Janzen’s assailant speaking from behind a bar—a visual podium from which to speak about her motivations and a platform from which to plead for the audience’s sympathy. Maybe Marupok A+ should have taken a cue from Zola: When it came time for Riley Keough’s counterargument, the film confined her version of events to a self-contained dramatization of Stefani’s denial on Reddit that took all of five minutes.

Crisp production values lift the film head and shoulders above other Filipino indie productions. But in failing to recognize that catfishing is pure and outright villainy, especially when inflicted upon a member of a marginalized minority, Marupok AF only gets a B.

Marupok A+: Where Is the Lie? opens exclusively in Ayala Malls on Wednesday, July 10. Zola is available to rent on Apple TV+. There are currently no streaming options for Dear David in the Philippines. Which is just as well, believe me.