The Drama (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

After his genre-bending humorous nightmare Dream Scenario, writer and director Kristoffer Borgli dives into the fraught world of romantic comedies. As we should surmise from the title, this is not the meet-cute leading to courtship that ends with marriage; there will indeed be drama along the way. The Drama is nominally about revelations: due to a stupid dare among friends who clearly don't know each other as well as they should, two couples each share their individual shame. Go around the circle, and tell everyone the worst thing you've done in your life. Sounds fun, right? 

Of course, everything goes horribly wrong. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are engaged, and her revelation that, as a teen, she planned a school shooting nearly destroys their relationship. She's drunk when she reveals this, and is sure to emphasize that she did not actually follow through or hurt anyone. But Charlie reels, wondering who this woman is and if he really wants to get married. Could she snap at any moment? Is the woman he's sleeping with and planning the rest of his life with capable of cold-blooded murder of kids? Even their friends (the other couple, played by Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) serving as best man and maid of honor are so horrified by this revelation that they withdraw from socializing in the week leading up to the wedding. 

Did I not mention? The timeframe of this film is literally the week before the wedding. Disturbing as this secret might feel to Charlie, we have to wonder why they haven't discussed deep, dark things before. Or, for that matter, why they don't have a therapeutic outlet for such disruptions to their relationship. Surely an emergency couples' therapy moment isn't out of the question, but instead the characters -- as in any rom-com or sitcom -- resort to shutting down and acting out in increasingly unhealthy ways. Emma apologizes endlessly, explicitly requesting "starting over" with any conversation that leaves her cornered and under the microscope, as of course they all do. Charlie, on the other hand, interrogates her at every opportunity, asking for more details, more justification, more reassurance. It's exhausting, even though Borgli has carefully paced things to avoid doldrums.

What is clear, even before Emma's revelation, is that Charlie is a sniveling coward of a man, riddled with crippling anxiety and so locked in his mind that he can barely engage for a full conversation. The opening sequence includes crosscut flashbacks to his meeting with Emma two years prior, and frankly it's a creepy introduction for us to his character. Thus, immediately, Borgli sets an unsettling tone not unlike any of a number of romantic thrillers of late: Charlie, spotting Emma reading in a cafe, hovers nearby to stare until Emma steps away so that he can hurry over and snap a pic of the book she's reading so he can look it up and say something clever about it. In this already semi-subversive moment, Borgli turns the screw yet farther by then having Charlie approach Emma not once but twice in an awkward exchange because, as she reveals, she's partially deaf and didn't hear him the first time.

Unfortunately, it's mostly downhill from here in terms of character interest. Sure, Emma's revelation is fascinating, but so are those of the others. One used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a dog attack, one locked her "slow" neighbor in an abandoned trailer overnight. Charlie himself admits to cyberbullying a kid who ended up having to move away. All committed actual violence on another person, yet when Emma describes her bullying and thinking about taking her father's rifle to school, they are so horrified they lose the ability to communicate humanely with her. Their self-righteous hypocrisy fuels the film, or at least it did for me: any time they showed up with their smug (and juvenile) piety, a veil of red descended over my mind until something else groan-inducing happened. 

In case you can't tell, the film juggles several thematic balls, and I'm not convinced any are brought to fruition, except perhaps Charlie's psychic violence being physically realized upon him before film's end. And he fully deserves it at that point, especially considering how he treats a co-worker. But it's hard to fully buy -- at any point in the film -- that Emma and Charlie even have much substance to their relationship. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but there's a hollowness baked into it. Perhaps her cute "why don't we start over?" suggestion at their initial encounter set a bad precedent for their relationship, wherein any time they argue they can just wipe it clean and disregard the real issues at the core of their dynamic. 

I do think it's a bit suspect that Borgli almost glaringly skirts the issues of Emma's gender and race while demonizing (and, arguably, redeeming) her in this story. Zendaya is performing a very different kind of character than we've seen from her of late; internalized and demure, apologetic and submissive in calculated ways. We wonder how much is real and how much is an act, perhaps intended to protect her from further accusations of being an "angry" Black woman or mentally ill, etc. So she listens and weeps and collapses her body to seem small, remorseful, and penitent. But she never really indicates if it's intentional or not, and I have to wonder if that's a result of the role being race-neutral; having the added layers simply as a result of casting becomes icky, though, as moments of her Louisiana background come to the fore and we see Charlie attempting to care for her as a violent madwoman of color.

But that's just my musing; the film itself sidesteps all these concerns, and I'm still not sure if that's for the better or not. It doesn't seem that Borgli is interested in us empathizing with these characters in the same way many romantic dramas are (I'm thinking of films about the dissolution of a marriage), preferring rather to make us feel uncomfortable and anxious. And in that, he succeeds magnificently. We're often treated to a warped sound mix, layering tidbits of conversation over each other into and out of scenes and montages, blurring the lines of reality and time. He sometimes saps the film of sound, putting us in Emma's aural perspective or, at least twice, in Charlie's stressed head. 

As a sensory experience and a conversation-starter, The Drama is more than worth a watch, preferably loud and with a group of intimate, hopefully married friends. As a story, and as messaging conveyed by the filmmakers, it doesn't quite satisfy. Kind of like its central relationship. Which makes the film's denouement especially complicated and uncomfortable, depending on how invested you become in these characters.