The Drama review: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson deliver cringe comedy in troubling wedding romance
A24 loves a romance that demands its audience reevaluate love. Consider the nightmare-fuel breakup movie that is Midsommar, the carnal journey of self-acceptance that is Babygirl, the aching anti-romance of Queer, the violent passion of Love Lies Bleeding, the path not chosen of Past Lives, and the buzzkill subplot of sexual assault in the love-triangle dramedy Materialists. To this curious company of hits and misses comes The Drama, Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli's follow-up to the Nicolas Cage-fronted Dream Scenario.
Written and directed by Borgli, The Drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a young couple who have great chemistry and a seemingly blissful marriage on their horizon. That is, until a dangerous drinking game throws the groom into a deep spiral of panic and doubt. We're not talking your average wedding jitters scenario. Borgli uses a troubling American issue to rattle the expectations of wedding-day drama. But much like Dream Scenario, his actors give more than his undercooked script deserves.
The Drama isn't about your common wedding upsets.
It's the week before Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are to marry, which should be stressful enough between buttoning up the details of menus, speeches, and a bespoke first dance number. However, Borgli heightens the tension of this chaotic time by snapping from the present to the couple's flashbacks, fantasies, and nightmares as the couple's idea of each other changes dramatically.
The romance between Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) begins rather blandly with a meet-cute at a coffee shop, where he lies about loving the book she's reading. Such a little white lie might seem harmless, but it's the first red flag — one of many. Through flashbacks, we witness Charlie doubling down on his lies. Though Emma learns the truth during their courtship and forgives him, Charlie can't handle a dark secret from her past.
Their relationship hits a wall as he desperately tries to rationalize her revelation. Their fast-approaching wedding day becomes a ticking clock as he can't shake his newfound fear of her. It's almost clever how Borgli has found a new route to explore cold feet. But the story that builds from this place is scattershot and shallow, much like Dream Scenario's compelling concept fell apart under the filmmaker's clumsy commentary on cancel culture.
Wait, so what happens in The Drama?
On a drunken night out with friends, Emma reveals "the worst thing" she's ever done was plan a school shooting. She makes it clear she didn't go through with it, but the reveal that she'd seriously considered such violence is enough to shatter her relationship with her maid of honor Rachel (a glowering Alana Haim) and threaten her upcoming marriage with Charlie.
With this revelation, Charlie no longer sees his fiancée as empathetic and kind, deleting these compliments from the draft of his wedding speech. He begins to imagine her holding a rifle, sometimes as her younger self (Jordyn Curet) and sometimes as her present self in lingerie, in their bed. As they argue over this revelation, he fantasizes that she's joking, and they can just push past it. He also imagines their wedding day as a mass shooting, with Emma chasing him down as their guests lie splayed among the decorated venue, blood staining their dress clothes.
Where the film begins as a double-hander, with both Emma and Charlie informing the narrative through dialogue and flashbacks intended to be from their respective perspectives, The Drama shifts to Charlie after the revelation. As the audience, we are urged to be more aligned with his fears and paranoia, and Emma becomes less and less knowable.
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There are many flashbacks to Emma's life as a teenager, fitfully showing her loneliness and the cold comfort her father's military rifle offered. But it's unclear if these looks back are Emma's memory or Charlie's imagination. Emma struggles to explain herself in the present as Charlie and his friends point out more red flags, like the accusation that Emma doesn't have any "real friends" of her own. She becomes a mystery to us as Borgli's script sides with Charlie through the perspective shift, leaving Emma alone in her thoughts and disconnected from her audience.
The Drama dabbles sloppily in misogynoir.
There's a racial undercurrent to The Drama that Borgli creates but doesn't seem to fully recognize or acknowledge. In the scene where they reveal the worst thing they've ever done, Charlie and Emma are opposite another interracial couple, Rachel and Mike (Mamoudou Athie). Though Rachel, who is white, tells a story of her committing an actual assault, the group is more disturbed by Emma's thought crime. And as the film shifts to what she looked like when she was younger, Borgli engages in colorism, casting the younger Emma as a darker-skinned Black woman with curlier hair.
There's an implication between this casting and Charlie's fear that he now sees Emma as a stereotypical angry Black woman. Though she's never been violent with him, he flinches when Emma picks up a kitchen knife, even though she's making them food. When he looks over a smutty book of women posing with guns, the barrage of white women posing with guns doesn't seem to alarm him. But when he sees a Black woman with a gun, his mind — and thus the edit — flashes to an image of Emma.
This is a connection Charlie — and therefore the movie — will never make aloud. Instead, Charlie suggests that maybe this scares him so much because he's British, and mass shootings are really more of an American thing. While this observation earned a few chuckles at the screening I attended, it's as deep as Borgli is willing to go into the culture clash between the couple. This is frustrating, because while the film seems to be intentionally engaging with the specific fears and anger targeted at Black women, it uses misogynoir and American gun violence as little more than a provocative flare for a story about a shallow man realizing the woman in his life has complexities he can't understand. The woman herself is left to wander mutely through the film's climax as her partner takes the spotlight.
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are well-matched in The Drama.
The pair share an easy intimacy in early scenes that paper over how poorly Borgli's script establishes who Emma and Charlie are as individuals or as a couple. Their chemistry allows the film's first act to essentially coast. From there, Zendaya smoothly follows the heartache of her actual Emma and performs the chilly threat Charlie imagines her to be. Pattinson, for his part, embraces playing the fool, throwing his ego aside to go face-first into one bad decision after another, leading to embarrassment and bloodshed.
Borgli's sense of humor doesn't remotely align with mine, so I didn't find The Drama funny. Still, his stars have a sharp comic timing that elevates even his sloppiest concepts. But overall, great performances — including those by a warm Athie, a vicious Haim, and a quizzical Hailey Benton Gates — can't save The Drama from Borgli's fumbling. Borgli and his co-editor Joshua Raymond Lee create kinetic energy through their collisions of past and present, reality and fantasy, and jump cuts from one scene to the next. This all creates a sense of anxiety, but the actual suspense dwindles as Emma is lost amid Charlie's running in circles of panic. It becomes less enticing or exciting and more tedious.
Still, those tired of Hollywood happy endings or whimsical romances might appreciate A24's latest vision of the rocky road to commitment. While I don't feel the film's climax is earned, it is wisely ambiguous. Much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Drama offers a conclusion that means Emma and Charlie's ending rests in the eye of the beholder. For all the film's fumblings, the ending hits hard.