‘The Drama’ is a film that is impossible to discuss what it’s really about without giving up an important plot point that is better to find out in the theater. Without any spoilers, I’ll do my best to write about this amazing film.
The film’s director, Kristoffer Borgli has delivered a very dark black comedy smuggled inside a wedding invitation, and it announces itself as an important entry in the cinema of discomfort.
The setup is a Trojan horse, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) a charmingly bumbling English museum curator, meets Emma (Zendaya) in a Copley Square coffee shop. Failed attempts, resets and lies begin their first meeting. From then on, we see parts of this relationship until we come upon them days before they go to the altar. A24 marketed what follows as a romantic comedy. It is not. Midway through a wine tasting with their closest friends, Emma makes a confession. I won’t tell you what it is. What I will tell you is that nothing will ever be the same for either of them.
Borgli, who announced himself with ‘Sick of Myself’ and confirmed his singular vision with ‘Dream Scenario’, has always understood that the most effective provocation wears a friendly face. Here he does something bolder still, he builds genuine romantic warmth in the first act, makes you care about these two people. The discomfort lands so hard precisely because the investment is real.
Pattinson’s performance begins as a conventional romantic lead, handsome, awkward in an appealing way, clearly smitten and then systematically dismantles that image scene by scene as the weight of Emma’s revelation takes its toll. It is a precisely engineered collapse, funny and frightening in equal measure, the kind of work that reminds you this is one of the most daring actors of his generation.
Zendaya matches him in every frame, and arguably surpasses him. Where Pattinson implodes outward, she turns inward — communicating guilt, defiance, love and terror through the smallest possible physical gestures. It is a performance built almost entirely in the eyes and the body, in the way she occupies a room and the way she shrinks inside it. She has never been better.
Alana Haim, as the maid of honor whose moral outrage may not be entirely earned, is an absolute force simultaneously the film’s sharpest comedic presence and its most unsettling one. The look she deploys at certain moments should be studied in acting schools.
What elevates ‘The Drama’ is Borgli’s refusal to be safe. He does not tell you how to feel about Emma’s confession. He does not signal where your sympathy should land. He simply presents the situation in all its messy, uncomfortable complexity and lets the audience do the moral work, which means every viewer will leave having had a slightly different film. That is a rare and genuinely difficult thing to pull off, and Borgli pulls it off completely.
What Borgli does in the back half of the film is remarkable. He doesn’t editorialize. He doesn’t place a guiding hand on your shoulder and steer you toward a correct emotional response. He just keeps the camera rolling while two people and their closest friends try to figure out whether love is actually capable of containing the full truth of another person and the answer the film arrives at is genuinely, troublingly ambiguous. I’ve been chewing on it for days.
The film will not be for everyone. Borgli has always been interested in the thing we’re not supposed to laugh at. It is, in the most literal sense, a film that picks a fight with its audience and trusts them to handle it. This is cinema doing what only cinema can, placing you inside an experience you could never safely have in real life, making you feel things you don’t entirely have permission to feel, and sending you out into the world a little less certain than when you went in. See it as soon as possible.
The Drama is in theatres now.
