The Drama will be released in theaters on April 3.
The tale of an engagement pushed to its limits, Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is a jet-black, white-knuckle dramedy in which a secret upends a young couple’s domestic bliss. Although marketed as having a major plot twist, the film features no such thing, and practically flies out the gate with its uniquely disturbing premise. However, in the interest of letting eager viewers absorb its delights unimpeded, you’ll find a handy spoiler warning before we get into details – though it’s fair to say The Drama isn’t exactly the kind of movie you can spoil. It’s a weird, wonderful hybrid of cultural and aesthetic sensibilities, led by an immensely dialed-in cast who deliver some of their most natural and unnerving performances to date. The result is raucous entertainment that makes you laugh, cringe, and hold your breath at the audacious combination of sympathetic character drama and farcical intensity.
A discombobulated structure ratchets up the tension right from the word go, as enthusiastic English expat and museum curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson) writes his wedding speech, while recalling to his affable best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) how he first met and approached his now-fiancé Emma (Zendaya), a literary editor. As we cut sharply between then and now, the Boston couple’s meet-cute is revealed to be more of a meet-cringe, as Charlie lays out his borderline manipulative approach with a goofy smile. Not realizing that Emma is deaf in one ear, he was given a second chance at a first impression, which makes for an adorable wedding story. But as the movie ping-pongs between past and present, it never lets you feel at ease about who its characters are deep down.
Emma, meanwhile, writes her own speech with her headstrong maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), Mike’s wife and Charlie’s college buddy. That she doesn’t seem to have old friends of her own isn’t really an issue, at least at first, but it starts to make unfortunate sense once the movie’s pieces click into place. After several days of wedding prep unfold in montage, The Drama finally slows and quiets down for an intimate dinner tasting, where Charlie, Emma, Mike and Rachel indulge in a drinking game of confessing the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie, Mike and Rachel get the gist of things, and make unpleasant but juvenile admissions from their teenage years. Emma, however, drops a bombshell about something she nearly did in high school, which — despite not actually coming to fruition — the trio of old friends find hard to comprehend, making her feel further like an outsider.
What follows is, by and large, Charlie’s story of coming undone as he’s unable to fully comprehend what Emma tells him, though not for lack of trying. Meanwhile, Emma begins picturing the gossipy conversations that her confidants might be having behind her back (“Do you want me to beat her up?” Mike asks in one hilarious daydream). As their nuptials draw nearer, these novel tensions keep bubbling to the surface, and the couple’s failures to fully communicate collide with a culturally-specific malaise — expounded upon in darkly funny, deeply disturbing childhood flashbacks. Their relationship gradually tears apart at the seams, culminating in one heck of a schadenfreude-filled wedding climax.
Borgli’s use of alternating sound and silence not only occasionally orients us within Emma’s aural point of view, but it also creates an uncanny soundscape, as unpredictable as his character’s outbursts, and their increasing emotional misalignment. Zendaya, whose film roles generally place a low ceiling upon her — her work on the TV show Euphoria is much more critically acclaimed — is a perfect fit for a young character whose most frequent modes involve witty banter and po-faced introspection on the verge of tears. Emma is a firecracker of a character, at least at first, but she gradually crumbles in on herself, resulting in the kind of dramatic big screen work few directors have ever afforded the Dune and Marvel star.
The film’s main event, however, is Pattinson at his idiosyncratic, pathetic best. Despite starting out as a YA heartthrob, his interviews have hinted at the kind of strange, awkward, self-effacing energy one rarely sees from his chiseled, square-jawed type — that is, until films like the Zellner Brothers’ Damsel, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. As the flailing Charlie, Pattinson never once sacrifices verisimilitude in pursuit of exploring this sweaty-palmed weirdo, who, on paper, much more closely fits the profile for the kind of gloomy past Emma reveals.
Speaking of which, this detail is likely to rub some viewers the wrong way, given its overt political dimensions and demographic subversions. But the film is — for better or worse — not interested in the broader politics of its incendiary premise, beyond a mild self-awareness about how its focus is a statistical anomaly. That Emma is an unlikely culprit makes her feel all the more misunderstood.
Minor spoilers follow.
The harsh secret Emma reveals at her tasting is that, as a teenager, she planned and almost carried out a mass shooting at her school. That she didn’t go through with it is both a relief, as well as a major curiosity and uncertainty for Charlie (not to mention a point of irony for Haim’s prickly Rachel, who’s especially upset by this revelation despite her own unsavory admission). It’s a distinctly American backdrop, but one the Norwegian writer-director frames through a sardonic lens typical of a Scandinavian indie. Which is by no means to suggest that Borgli doesn’t take Emma’s plight any less seriously; in fact, her flashbacks (where she’s played with heartbreaking remove by young actress Jordyn Curet) are so swiftly interspersed with the “present” scenes that they feel practically contemporary, and as much a part of Emma’s fragile psyche as her wedding planning.
In his efforts to better understand Emma, Charlie becomes the center of some wonderfully poignant abstractions involving Pattinson spending brief time with the younger version of Emma, played by Curet. Although these may take on an unfortunate, unintended double meaning in light of a recent scandal involving Borgli (a resurfaced op-ed on age gaps from 2012), the images themselves are thoughtfully conceived, hinting at the fantasy of truly knowing your partner by facing every facet of their past, and questioning how you might have clicked (if at all) had you known a different version of them.
The Drama runs the emotional gamut as it rattles its audience through a tale of a woman who regrets being vulnerable for the very first time, and a man whose own cultural position as an outsider to the U.S. makes him especially skeptical of a defining part of her childhood. Borgli doesn’t necessarily engage with the movie’s racial optics, beyond acknowledging that they exist (Rachel, for instance, has a malformed view of her own husband’s life as a Black man), but the story’s dramatic contours are no less realistic in their emotional peaks and valleys. They are, at times, so lashing that it’s hard not to be awed by just how fine-tuned the dark comedy ends up being, resulting in nerve-shredding moments of disconnect fighting constantly with the characters’ genuine desire to stay together.
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