No other film this year will make you feel as uncomfortable as The Drama. Don’t miss out on it. It’s provocative and compulsively watchable – a romcom that obliterates the very meaning of the word, by thrusting love under the psychoanalyst’s microscope and tearing laughter by force from its viewers’ throats.
That makes it a small miracle in our modern artistic landscape: a film that never spoon-feeds its audience or worries too much about having every screw on its carriage tightened. It’s conflicted, messy, ambiguous, and imperfect, but it’s treated with enough of a delicate, scrupulous hand to test the moral waters and not degrade itself in the process.
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson star – in the first of a triptych of collaborations this year, to include The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three – as Emma and Charlie, a pair of comfortably affluent Bostonians in the run-up to their nuptials. An idle, drunken conversation with their closest, married friends (Mamoudou Athie’s Mike and Alana Haim’s Rachel) leads to a round of confessions. As they move around the table, each sheepishly reveals what they believe to be the worst thing they’ve ever done. A bad boyfriend. A bully. A thoughtless child. It’s all laughed off, until Emma’s turn – and what she says next immediately sucks the air from the room.
The point here is less the shock value of The Drama’s big “twist” – details of which, if you’re curious, have already leaked online and begun to garner controversy – than what’s exposed in the fallout, as the characters’ scramble to act in the most ethically “correct” fashion inevitably exposes them as hypocrites and narcissists. After all, their confession game leads on directly from a conversation about whether Emma and Charlie should fire their wedding DJ because they caught her smoking heroin out on the street.
What Emma did (or didn’t) do itself offers a nauseous portrait of the collective American mind that can’t be discussed here. But there are broader questions, too, that connect the film with Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s previous works Sick of Myself (2022) and Dream Scenario (2023) – about who our empathy extends to, and under what circumstances, and whether we’re able to make peace between the quality of a person’s soul and how their actions have been shaped by public perception.
And Borgli, whose film is produced by horror’s current champion of neuroses, Eddington’s Ari Aster, allows these ideas to roam wild by keeping a steel grip on tone. Editor Joshua Raymond Lee works in a constant state of attack; what humour there is remains pitch-dark but never flippant, while Zendaya and Pattinson circle each other with twitchy, elastic energy.
There’s a desperate desire on Charlie’s part – and the audience’s, too – to contextualise Emma’s thoughts and behaviour in order to make sense of them. How much is she a product of her culture? Is there some trauma there? To what extent is the fact that she’s a biracial Black woman relevant to what she did, and to how people choose to react? Can we believe that she’s no longer the person she once was? Is there a difference between intent and action?
The Drama asks questions I’m not sure I have the answer to. And that makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel exposed and challenged. It also makes me want to talk about it with every person I meet. And if that’s not the point of art, then what is?
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Dir: Kristoffer Borgli. Starring: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Mamoudou Athie, Alana Haim, Hailey Gates, Zoë Winters. Cert 15, 105 minutes.
‘The Drama’ is in cinemas from 3 April
