Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in a scene from 'The Drama.'A24/The Associated Press
The Drama
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli
Starring Robert Pattinson, Zendaya and Alana Haim
Classification 14A; 105 minutes
Opens in theatres April 3
Early in The Drama, a film that is naturally designed as a comedy, a couple on a first date discuss a new novel that has led to their initial meet-cute. The man, a charming British museum curator named Charlie (Robert Pattinson), listens intently as the woman, a quieter New Yorker of no real defined profession named Emma (Zendaya), discusses her puzzlement over the book’s conclusion. “What do you think about the ending?” Emma asks.
The on-screen query is about as close as you can get to the movie’s director, Kristoffer Borgli, preparing his audience for their own reactions to the film’s finale, suggesting that everyone is in for one hell of a ride. Yet the last few minutes of The Drama are in fact its most conventional and satisfying. It is everything in between that’ll leave you at your wit’s end.
The fourth film in a row in which the Norwegian provocateur Borgli skewers the most poisonous elements of contemporary American culture – the most recent entry being his 2023 Nicolas Cage cancel-culture farce Dream Scenario – The Drama is a hermetically sealed kind of cinematic prank.
It is almost impossible to genuinely discuss without spoiling the film’s central twist, which has been playfully (or perhaps annoyingly) teased ever since the movie’s marketing efforts kicked into high gear last year. Don’t worry: I’m not going to ruin anything here, even though Borgli’s particular conceit deserves to be shot down with a bazooka, given how faux-incendiary it ends up being.
Let’s just say that, after Emma and Charlie’s first date, the pair gradually falls in love, eventually reaching the point where they are just one week away from exchanging vows. In the midst of the wedding planning, though, the couple experiences a supremely awkward double date with their respective best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and maid of honour Rachel (Alana Haim), during which the foursome are coaxed into sharing “the worst thing that they’ve ever done.” Each participant has their own particularly awful answer, but it is Emma who takes the (premature slice of wedding) cake. Her story is jaw-dropping and horrifying, all the more so in how she unpacks its consequences.
Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim.The Associated Press
The crux of the film, though, is how Charlie processes this information, and whether he – or Emma – can go forward with their union. But Borgli seems unsure of whether he is making a film about the complexities of a marriage – the big fat question of whether you can really know what lurks inside anyone’s heart – or something larger and messier about the state of the modern American psyche. The emotional meltdowns that follow feel shapeless when they’re not exasperating, with the remainder of the film landing like a supersized, but not particularly uproarious, episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Whereas Borgli’s previous films needled very particular Western preoccupations with jagged and unrelenting glee – not only in Dream Scenario, but also 2022’s Sick of Myself (which satirized Instagram-bred beauty standards) and 2017’s DRIB (overcaffeinated marketing campaigns) – here the satirical vibes are, to borrow the vernacular of The Drama’s central characters, decidedly off.
The discomfort Emma’s past causes for her soon-to-be-husband, for her best friend, for everyone else with the possible exception of, well, her – the character is something of a cipher – is palpable, but fleeting, too. Meaningless, almost.
Zendaya is as compelling as always in the film.The Associated Press
And the few genuine laughs that Borgli earns, including the best record-scratch moment in recent cinematic history, are undercut by some curiously placed gags. (Most notably one throwaway joke involving pedophilia, which I’m surprised the film’s distributor, A24, didn’t hurriedly cut at the last minute after a 2012 essay by Borgli resurfaced in which he details his relationship, at age 27, with a teenage girl.)
It is anyone’s guess how much of a Borgli stand-in Pattinson’s immensely conflicted character is here – or maybe the filmmaker feels more aligned with the taboo-busting Emma – but the cast does their best to filter all the anxious chatter of the screenplay into something approaching relatable reality.
Zendaya is as compelling as always, but it is Pattinson, flailing about as if caught in an actual whirlwind instead of a merely dramatic one, who seizes all the big moments. And in a small but pivotal role, Hailey Gates makes a meal out of a one-note character who proves crucial to some wedding-day pyrotechnics.
There is some drama here, all right. But the curtain can’t draw down soon enough.