‘The Drama’: A dark comedy about thought, guilt, and perception
Spoilers ahead for the film The Drama
It’s almost impossible to talk about The Drama, the new film from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, without talking about a revelation that emerges in the first 20 minutes of the film. It presents a sticky problem for film critics because the film would be best watched without this early twist spoiled but so much of the plot hinges on its aftermath that it has to be included in any review of the film worth reading. With that warning in place, here goes.
Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Robert Pattinson (Charlie Thompson) are a young couple preparing for their wedding which is only a few days away. They go to the wedding venue accompanied by their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mamoudou Athie (Mike), a married couple who are respectively the Maid of Honour and the Best Man. With the wine and conversation flowing, Rachel comes up with the idea for each person at the table to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. A suggestion disguised as a fun party game which upon closer inspection more closely resembles a humiliation ritual.
Everyone reluctantly agrees and proceeds to share stories of varying degrees of depravity. But it’s Emma’s story which completely derails the evening’s activities. She confesses to having planned a school shooting when she was 15 years old but deciding against it at the last minute. The atmosphere at the table and indeed the rest of the film completely shifts in this moment and we’re launched headfirst into a dark comedy about what our darkest thoughts reveal about us and how that affects how the people closest to us see us.
For the rest of the film the story mainly unfolds through Charlie’s POV who contorts himself into a pretzel agonising about what this new information about his fiancé means for their relationship. He presses Emma for more details about the incident and her thought process but this only pushes him further down a spiral of anxiety and paranoia. All the while, the couple continue their wedding plans, meeting with the photographer and working on their respective speeches.
Borgli’s film dances between hilarity and discomfort, throwing you from one scene that feels too uncomfortable to watch to another that’s laugh out loud funny. And his status as an outsider to American culture is essential to his point of view because school shootings are such a uniquely American phenomenon. In 2025, there were at least 78 shootings with 32 killed and 122 injured in the United States and by March 12 this year there had already been eight, mainly on college campuses. No other country in the world comes close to this volume of school shootings yet there are taboos around how it’s spoken about.
The Drama has come under criticism for taking the issue too lightly but I would argue that the film actually approaches the horror of this phenomenon in a unique and compelling way without necessarily trivialising it. Charlie, a British man, is himself an outsider and spends a chunk of the film trying to understand Americans’ fascination with gun violence. But the film is much less documentary than it is character study. Emma and Charlie struggle to keep things together as the day of their wedding approaches but it becomes increasingly hard to do so, especially with the judgement of their friends.
Borgli expertly explores the gap between who we are in private and how other people see us, littering the film with scenes unfolding in Emma and Christopher’s nightmarish imaginations. The story is clearly meant to provoke but perhaps the writer-director’s penchant for the provocative is at times problematic. Another reason there has been controversy around the film is because an essay written by the Norwegian director when he was 27 recently resurfaced.
In it, Borgli describes being in a relationship with a 16-year-old girl when he was 26 and mentions being inspired by Woody Allen’s Manhattan – a film written and directed by Allen in which he plays a 43-year-old man who embarks on a relationship with a 17-year-old girl. The choice of referencing Allen given the allegations against the man and his disturbing relationship history says a lot. The age of consent in Norway is 16 but the ethical and moral implications of the essay have understandably been enough to turn many people off the director and his work.
And, unlike the protagonist in his new film, this isn’t something that Borgli just thought about doing. It’s something he did and then sought to justify in writing later. Ironic then that Borgli’s film may fail for precisely the reason he seeks to explore in the film itself – how people see us can change dramatically once they get a glimpse of our darkest thoughts.