Nothing about the promotional rollout for “The Drama” is out of the ordinary. A Google search of the film would identify it as a romance, and a scroll on social media would point towards a comedy-drama centered around the impending nuptials of Robert Pattinson’s Charlie and Zendaya’s Emma. Even the trailer is innocuous, a lilting score dancing over what appears to be by all accounts a charming love story — a deliberately sanitized image that withholds the disturbing twist at the core of the film’s conflict.
In fact, this seemingly conventional love story is told in just the first 20 minutes of the film. Viewers are springboarded into the story as Charlie writes his wedding speech, prompting recollections of his and Emma’s firsts — meeting, date and kiss. These seemingly mundane relationship benchmarks are cut so precisely and edited so sharply as to inject a sense of anxiety into the film from its start.
Only after such a tone is set does the film’s central conceit emerge, during a menu sampling which Emma and Charlie attend alongside best man Mike and maid of honor Rachel. Enough wine is consumed to propel conversation into confession, as Rachel encourages — or more aptly, pressures — each party at the table into admitting the worst thing they have ever done.
Almost immediately, this exercise drops the film into a far darker tonal register, leaning into an unease that is not limited to any single character or exchange but woven deeply into its fabric. Mike, Rachel and Charlie all confess to transgressions of various degrees of offense, but it is Emma’s admission — and the disturbing revelation about her past it introduces — that catalyze the remaining 90 minutes.
Across the opening exposition, Zendaya does excellent work in framing Emma as inhibited to the point of being off-putting. Throughout the film, she often retreats into herself, hiding inside big sweaters and behind her hair — worn long in the flashbacks, cut shorter in the present and notably tied back during the film’s most critical moments. That being said, Zendaya also has a lot less work to do following Emma’s confession, because the fallout of her actions is experienced through Charlie’s perspective. Pattinson is excellent at conveying his rapidly spiraling anxiety as he processes how — or whether — to move forward with a newfound understanding of Emma.
Charlie’s strife is deeply interior, and yet director Kristoffer Borgli makes the choice to navigate it cinematically through a sustained interplay with continuity. He achieves this through intentionally fractured time jumps, through different versions of the same scene presented in conflict with one another and even through dreamlike vision sequences where the audience gets to exist in flashes within Charlie’s or Emma’s head.
For Charlie, such play with memory and reality becomes a means of searching for the truth, while for Emma it is an attempt to reckon with it. For both characters, however, that truth proves impossible to fully repress and inevitably comes out of them, sometimes literally in the form of vomit. This psychological pressure is mirrored in the film’s visual language –– as the tension increases, the camera inches progressively closer to its actors, rooting the eponymous drama in the people themselves.
Even so, the question of what “The Drama” ultimately perceives as its drama is left unanswered. The subject of the film’s scrutiny is constantly shifting, from Emma to Charlie to Rachel to Emma’s parents to society at large, which has the adverse effect of rendering any attempt to deliver a cohesive message ineffectual. Borgli attempts to open space to interrogate the harmful effects of media on young people, the Freudian notion of trauma repression or even the uneasy reality of love’s necessary compromises — larger cultural questions that are deeply relevant and thought-provoking, but that he also chooses to leave unanswered.
It is for this reason that “The Drama” ultimately falls short. Its comedy is relentlessly unsettling and uncomfortable, but its drama fails to amount to anything at all. By venturing into controversial and sensitive territory — as made clear by the backlash that the reveal and the treatment thereof has already sparked online — Borgli is flirting with real stakes, but a lack of conviction in following them through makes such provocation feel more superficial than substantive.
Throughout the film, dating back to her first introduction to Charlie where she extends him the metaphorical olive branch of a clean slate, Emma has a penchant for asking to start over. So, too, does Borgli seem to dance around the idea of new beginnings, as he opens door after door without drawing any of them shut behind him. By continually resetting the emotional stakes, Borgli leaves “The Drama” circling its own central drama rather than confronting it.
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