The Drama

April 23 – 26

Friday 3:30 & 7 pm
Saturday 7:00 pm
Sunday 1:30 & 7 pm

Drama
Rating: 14A – 1hr 43min

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 Drama is a mashup of two American phenomena: the Hollywood marriage comedy and the high-school shooting. Part of its ingenuity is this generic ambiguity: satire or thriller? We may not be sure of the tone in which the secret is presented; its status as a macabre black-comic absurdity depends on accepting Emma’s complete recovery. A female shooter is vanishingly rare compared with male ones, but Borgli’s script pre-empts that objection with examples.

No matter how real and genuinely in love a couple may be, there’s no getting around an essential truth: weddings are an act of performance. Whatever variations there may be in the details of that performance, expectations exist and surprises are rare.

The Drama understands this and cracks those expectations wide open with a perverse sense of humor. Filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli’s intriguing and disquieting comedy is, to some extent, about the strains of wedding performance, and more acutely, that of relationship performance. It begins with a meet-cute that’s less cute than it is kind of embarrassing, in the way straight men can so often be. Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a handsome bumbling Brit, crafts a scenario of mild deception to hit on Emma (Zendaya), the bookish beautiful American he spies in a Cambridge, Mass., coffee shop. Some might call this a relationship red flag, a tenuous foundation upon which to try building a connection with a stranger. (Not unlike, say, lying about your height on a dating app.)

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. The Drama is a provocative, neurotic romcom that will make you feel exposed and challenged – and eager to talk about the movie’s shocking twist with absolutely everyone you meet.