Here Comes the Bride

Among contemporary Millennial directors, Kristoffer Borgli stands out as the one filmmaker consistently making films set in a world we recognize. Besides Eddington, Ari Aster’s films essentially take place in a bubble (ditto Emerald Fennell); Robert Eggers once said that “the idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill;” and the Safdie Brothers, with the exception of The Curse, have moved into period pieces this decade. Borgli’s three feature films—Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario, and now The Drama—concern a particular kind of modern unraveling, equal parts self-sabotage and mob punishment. Sick of Myself follows a young woman who injures, poisons, and eventually disfigures herself out of jealousy after her boyfriend enjoys some modest success in the art world; Dream Scenario saw Nicolas Cage as an ineffectual academic who starts showing up in everyone’s dreams, first to their amusement and then their terror; The Drama stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a couple whose trust in each other is thrown into question just a week before their wedding.

Neither of them cheated (or disfigured themselves). The secret comes out during a casual dinner with friends (including a silver-tongued Alana Haim). The Drama is a good movie, you should see it, but there’s no way to talk about it without mentioning the “twist,” suggested in all the advertising but never spelled out. It’s a weird one, too: Haim proposes that they play a game where they all tell each other the worst thing they’ve ever done. Haim’s husband admits he once used a girlfriend as “a human shield” against a rabid dog, while Haim confesses to locking a “slow” kid in a closet in an abandoned building when she was a young girl (she left him there, but there was a search party, and they found him the next day). Pattinson can’t come up with anything significant, but Zendaya has a scorcher: when she was 15, she nearly carried out a mass shooting.

If you’ve seen the trailer, this is when Haim screams “WHAT THE FUCK?!” They all start asking questions, and Zendaya clarifies without much fuss: her dad had a rifle, she liked the “subculture” of school shooters, and she endured some very, very mild bullying at her majority white private high school. This reveal happens early on, and Borgli barely pulls off what’s essentially a one-joke movie (like Sick of Myself). But in a theater full of people laughing, completely engrossed in each escalating misunderstanding, it’s hard to get too annoyed. I saw someone say that this movie “only works” because Zendaya is a black woman, which I don’t understand—would Pattinson be any less sympathetic or suspicious admitting the same thing? It’s not as if white men have a monopoly on mass murder—who’s throwing I.E.D.s in New York now?

Could you trust, let alone marry, someone who once seriously contemplated random murder? I imagine this is going to be a very contentious date movie, because that central question is essentially a re-wording of “Would you still love me if I were [x]?” I’ve seen plenty of women admit that they don’t see what the big deal is regarding Zendaya’s secret, and even more have expressed sympathy not only for the character but how she’s treated by everyone around her, especially Haim, who makes a scene at the wedding they ultimately do share. Pattinson doesn’t make it through the ceremony without getting beat up, and Zendaya’s a pariah in Pattinson’s social circle, but they work it out in the end. Unlike his first two movies, Borgli delivers a satisfying, classical Hollywood ending for his stars: bloodied and exhausted, Pattinson makes his way to a nearby diner, the one the couple said they’d go to on their wedding night. Zendaya shows up a few minutes later, ready to make up.

“You come here often?” They start over, as Zendaya insisted they should ever since she talked about her past. Pattinson’s game, and The Drama ends with two people even more in love with each other than they were before, and all of their friends and family revealed as shallow, selfish frauds who don’t really care about them. It’s a beautiful ending to an otherwise uneven film, one with a thin premise stretched to the absolute limit. But it never breaks, and The Drama never completely goes off the rails. As far as contemporary movies go, The Drama is one of the few that’s distinctly 2020s in its concerns, style, and anxious tone. I hope there are more comedies like this and fewer prepubescent movies like Friendship and Hundreds of Beavers.

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM