Sometimes putting some distance between viewing a film and reviewing it can be beneficial. Particularly ones as thorny and intentionally provocative as The Drama, a film that requires a bit of reflection before forming an opinion. It’s a film that works best when watched blind, and there isn’t so much a twist as much as it is a revelation purposefully withheld from the marketing in order to obscure what the film is actually about. That reveal is the true premise of The Drama, so calling it a twist is a bit of a misnomer. Because so much of the film itself relies on this withheld piece of information, I’m going to spend this review talking around the film rather than about it. There are plenty of spoiler filled reviews you can read, but for the sake of this critique, we’re going to keep the details vague and focus on the broader themes and aspects.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, The Drama follows newlyweds Charlie (Robert Pattison) and Emma (Zendaya), whose wedding day is right around the corner. We learn about their relationship through flashbacks and present day planning, and everything seems like the perfect engagement for a perfect couple. One night during a final food sampling and a lot of wine, her friend Rachel (Alana Haim) suggests they all go around and say the worst thing they’ve ever done. They’re all pretty mild – Mike (Mamoudou Athie) used an ex girlfriend as a human shield against a wild dog, Charlie may have cyberbullied someone, and Rachel locked a kid in an abandoned RV closet. All of these were done as teenagers or at least much younger versions of themselves, and they all laugh them off. That is until Emma, chugging a big glass of wine, reveals her own worst. Things quickly go off the rails as each person has a different reaction and everything from that point on becomes covered by the cloud of her past misdeeds. The Drama also starts Zoe Winter, Hailey Benton Gates, and Sydney Lemmon.
Not Your Typical Romantic Comedy
It is pretty misleading to call The Drama a romantic comedy. I get that you can’t really call it anything else without revealing more than preferred, but the film is only built on the bones of the genre and little else. Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario, Sick of Myself) utilizes the framework to set the table for what will eventually descend into a spiral of psychological unraveling and high wire tension. It’s almost a dark satire of the genre, complete with an almost deconstructed meet-cute, the barrage of wedding planning and social facades, and a growing sense of anything that can go wrong will – our only respite being the hope that love will overcome it all. The Drama smartly rips the romcom genre to shreds in this way, highlighting the silliness of the tropes without ever directly satirizing them.
It’s actually the pieces of the puzzle that work the best, with Borgli continuing his interest in the nastiest parts of the human condition and the idea that everyone on some level is performing for everyone else. On that front, The Drama is perfectly aligned with the thematic introspections that interest Borgli. There’s even a scene that calls this out directly, and the film is always quick to draw attentionto the stresses of societal niceties. But it’s that looming dark cloud of Emma’s reveal that begins to not only transform the film into something else entirely, but skews the overall intention of everything that came before it. As an exercise in uncomfortable tension, The Drama is excellent. But as an exploration of its darker concepts, it struggles to fully understand or engage with them.
There’s a strong outside looking in quality to what Borgli is trying to tackle with his characters, and because he doesn’t quite grasp the subject matter it shortchanges the real protagonist – Emma and her confession – and makes it all about Charlie and his own psychological reckoning. The Drama often refuses to earnestly unpack Emma’s trauma and instead forces her to relive it as Charlie and her friends all try to make sense it for themselves. Everyone not named Emma is selfish and self serving – another common Borgli staple – and it would be much more impactful if Emma was given more agency over her own unpacked past. That’s not to say it’s not effective. It certainly is, and cringe and uncomfortable doesn’t even begin to cover the visceral tension viewers are sure to feel. The Drama pushes the limits of what you can laugh at, leaving the only option to break the tension to let out a little uncomfortable ‘I can’t believe this is happening’ chuckle.
Zendaya and Pattinson Deliver Standout Performances
Both Zendaya and Pattinson turn in terrific performances. As a fault of its framing, Pattinson is given the most to do on the page, extrapolating a man in moral crisis as he tries to keep the image of who his partner is while trying to process who she was. The Drama really beats him up emotionally too, and Pattinson is so good as a bumbling beau desperately trying to have it all. Zendaya isn’t given as much on paper, but she’s so talented and such a skilled observer that she manages to make peering at her own life through other people’s interpretations engaging.
You really feel for Emma even when she’s painted as the villain by those around her, and that’s more of a testament to Zendaya’s immense magnetism than it is by anything written in the script. The supporting cast shines bright too, with Winters and Gates making the most of their limited screentime and Haim perfectly capturing the most self righteous, dislikable hypocrite I’ve seen in a while. She’s particularly nasty, hiding behind the facade of victimhood and posturing that really demonstrates her ever growing abilities. You’re suppose to hate Rachel, and Haim does an excellent job in giving you plenty of reasons to do so.
The Drama asks a lot of its audience. It wants you to invest in a prickly story of love vs lust, social performance vs real communication, revenge vs redemption, forgiveness vs acceptance all under the guise of a rom-com couple experiencing the worst revelations at the worst possible time. But it also asks you to wrestle with your own moral quagmire in real time, constantly asking yourself what you would do in this situation. It’s a tight rope balancing act that almost works, but falls short by not investigating itself fully. For The Drama to really feel cohesive, Borgli would have to wrap his wide arms around the material with a more learned tone.
But instead, even the catalyst of events falls by the wayside in the third act, almost forgotten were it not for our characters forcibly bringing it up for their own sake. As it starts to putter out – the premise brushed aside and no longer the focus – it becomes clear that driving force of The Drama isn’t sustainable for its runtime. Even as it moves with a breakneck pace and blends reality and fantasy with manic editing, you start to ask yourself if everyone is overreacting and why we’re still here at this wedding when the DJ packed up an hour ago.
Final Thoughts
The Drama is a whole lot of movie, and while some of it works – the incisive premise, the excellent performances, the constant escalating tension – it fails to really engage with its own premise in ways that feel as purposeful as they are provocative. It almost feels irresponsible to bring it all up and then dismiss it, asking the questions without even bothering to provide some semblance of an answer. It wants to have some very necessary conversations but never wants to go deep enough, making it the wrong place to have them entirely. I will always be on the side of films that breed discussion, and The Drama is sure to generate plenty of discourse as more and more people attend the wedding and see the spilled tea.
But provocation can only work with proper intention, and I don’t believe The Drama, even with its heart in the right place and plenty of other interesting themes scattered around to unpack ends up making good on those intentions.
I think someone needs to queue up As Long As You Love Me by The Backstreet Boys and start over. I can fix her, you guys.
Rating: 6 out of 10
The Drama is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer below.
