Synopsis: A happily engaged couple is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding week off the rails.
Stars: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Mamoudou Athie, Alana Haim, Hailey Benton Gates, Sydney Lemmon, Hannah Gross, Anna Baryshnikov, Zoë Winters
Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Rated: R
Running Length: 106 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: The Drama is a morally combustible, brilliantly performed, and formally daring romantic comedy that Kristoffer Borgli refuses to let off the hook. Pattinson and Zendaya fly high with challenging material. Go in cold. Talk about it after.
Review:
Kristoffer Borgli makes films about the moment polite society cracks and what spills out when it does. His previous work — the mordantly funny Dream Scenario and the squirm-inducing Sick of Myself — established him as one of the sharpest observers of conventional discomfort working today.
With The Drama, a new release from risk-takers A24, he has made his most intimate and most combustible film yet. A happily engaged Boston couple, weeks from the altar, sit down to dinner with their two best friends. They drink too many glasses of natural wine. Someone suggests a game. One of the four answers in a way that nobody at the table will recover from. Whatever you think this movie is going to be from that description, I promise you are only half right.
A certain outlet with a rhyme scheme I will not dignify here (I’ll give you a hint, it sounds like Yahoo! News) put the spoiler-specific details of what happens in a headline before I got to see the film, and the reveal still knocked the wind out of me. Had I gone in cold, it would have been staggering. So my advice is to go in knowing as little as possible. In fact, theaters should legally be required to install water coolers next to this one, because the conversations that spill out of the exits are going to need somewhere to happen.
What Borgli Does That Nobody Else Is Doing Right Now
It did not surprise me at all to learn The Drama was written by someone from Scandinavia. I do not think an American filmmaker would have had the resolve to expose this particular raw nerve and then refuse, with considerable discipline, to tell you what to think about it. Borgli is not interested in smoothing over anything. He is interested in the heat that flushes your face when you realize you have been complicit in a judgment and you are not sure if the decision was correct.
His previous films were both about the specific discomfort of being asked to confront something in another person that society has decided it knows how to categorize. The Drama operates in the same territory but with higher personal stakes. These are not strangers. These are the people who made the dinner reservation and wrote the seating chart.
What makes the film formally distinctive is what Borgli does in the editing room, which he shares credit for with Joshua Raymond Lee. Scenes bleed into one another across timelines. Present tense, imagination, and memory layer on top of each other until the film’s vocabulary feels appropriately unstable. It is flashy without being showy. It gives the movie a shape that feels emotionally true: this is what it is like when you can’t stop replaying something obsessively in your mind, wondering at the different outcomes.
Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan shoots on film, a wise choice. The result gives The Drama a texture that roots the story in the present while lending it the quality of a memory already distorting at the edges. Costume designer Katina Danabassis (Bodies Bodies Bodies) and production designer Zosia Mackenzie calibrate the Boston world these characters inhabit to a T. Daniel Pemberton’s (Project Hail Mary) score threads through the tonal shifts, scoring both the comedy and the dread with equal care.
Two Leads Who Have Never Been Better Together
It shouldn’t surprise the viewer how dependably excellent this cast is. Pattinson (The Batman) has been doing extraordinary work for years in films that do not always reach the audience they deserve, and Charlie is the role that may finally crystallize why he is one of the best actors working right now. He plays a soft-spined man with considerable charm, someone who starts the film as an endearingly clumsy romantic and ends it as something far harder to diagnose.
His Charlie engineers a meet-cute by surreptitiously peeking at the book Zendaya’s Emma is reading in a coffee shop and then lying about having read it. It is a small fraud that sets the relationship’s foundation on a cracked tile from the jump, and Pattinson plays the man who knows that tile is there without ever directly acknowledging it.
Zendaya (Challengers) gives Charlie more than he can handle, which is entirely the point. Where he internalizes and stalls, Emma moves toward problems. She is action-oriented where he is frozen. She is transparent where he performs. (Oh so evident in an awkward encounter with their wedding DJ.) Zendaya walks a tightrope that requires her to be sympathetic and unknowable in the same breath, and she stays balanced the whole way.
There is a easy-to-digest edition of this film where Emma is a riddle the audience and Charlie solve together. Borgli refuses that version. She is not a riddle to be figured out. She is a person we can’t ever fully know. The film knows the difference.
The Supporting Cast That Makes It Complete
Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza) is giving the performance that will get overlooked and shouldn’t be. As the maid-of-honor, Rachel’s reaction to the evening’s revelation is the most extreme of the group, and Haim plays her with a righteous fury that is both understandable and deeply revealing about Rachel’s own interior. She is deploying someone else’s story as a container for feelings that have nothing to do with her and everything to do with her. Haim makes that contradiction specific and human and it elevates every scene she is in.
Rachel’s husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie, Elemental) is the film’s moral ballast. He holds his friendship witht the couple and his marriage together while the room rewires itself around him. The restraint he brings is enormous. And Hailey Benton Gates (The Moment) as Misha, Pattinson’s museum colleague, arrives in what seems like a small role and turns it into one of the film’s most important scenes. The kind of performance that comes out of the woodwork and shifts the entire floor plan.
The Conversation That Follows You Home
Here is what The Drama is not: a film with a villain and a victim and a lesson. Here is what it is: a film that puts you in a room where no one is entirely right and no one is entirely wrong. It then asks you to sit with the discomfort of not being able to sort anyone cleanly. It is about how we grant second chances for some misdeeds and not others. Societal judgment moves through the people closest to us like a current we can feel but cannot see. And at its core, the film is about the terrifying intimacy of truly knowing another person, and what that knowledge demands of us.
An Ending That Refuses to Lie to You
I have been thinking about it since I watched it. The ending, which some critics have found unsatisfying, feels to me like the only honest choice. Borgli is not going to manufacture a resolution that the situation does not earn. He throws up his hands not because he does not care. He has been in this room long enough to know there is no clean exit. That is not a failure of the screenplay. That is the screenplay being honest about what happens when real life does not cooperate with dramatic structure.
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