“The Drama” Struggles with its Secrets
A fair warning: unlike most reviews on this site, this one will include spoilers for The Drama.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” It’s a question sure to cause ripples in the strongest relationship unless it’s already been discussed more than a few days before the wedding. Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli (who found himself in some drama of his own when a 2012 essay about his age-gap relationship resurfaced this week), The Drama is about a picture-perfect relationship that’s thrown a massive curveball days before nuptials are to take place.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) meet in a cafe. It’s the sort of bumbling, saccharine meet cute that’s rare in real life. Emma’s reading with one headphone on. Charlie is drawn to speak to her, but when he does, she seemingly blows him off. He retreats, tail between his legs, only to return with an apology. It’s then that she notices him and is confused by what he’s saying. Emma explains that she’s deaf in one ear and she didn’t hear him the first time. The rest is blissful history until they’re drinking wine with their married friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who ask the fateful question, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
courtesy of A24
The worst thing Mike ever did was use an ex-girlfriend as a human shield when a dog started attacking them in an alley. Charlie cyberbullied someone when he was fourteen. Rachel abandoned and locked a kid in a closet in an RV in the woods and didn’t tell anyone where he was, even when she saw a search party forming. Emma had fully planned to carry out a school shooting. When she admits that, you can hear a pin drop. They don’t know if Emma is joking and they can’t process what their friend is saying.
The Drama cannot process Emma’s actions either. Throughout the rest of the film, the script half-heartedly explains that Emma was bullied as a teen, had easy access to a firearm, and was clearly struggling with her mental health. Her parents seemed to be nowhere during her childhood. On paper, the issue here is not the secret itself. Emma, fictional or not, isn’t the only American kid who grew up with mass shootings and thought about doing it themselves. It’s a world-altering thing to learn about someone, that they considered inflicting that much pain and violence on people, but it’s the movie’s job to explore how Emma got to that place in her life. You can’t just half-heartedly blame depression, America’s gun obsession, or the angst of adolescence. Who does that help?
Instead of delving into the distinctly American reality of school shootings, the film uses this conceit as a gateway for uncomfortable cringe comedy. The day after the revelation, Emma and Charlie have to meet with their wedding photographer, who keeps saying “shoot” in reference to her shot list. It’s played for laughs and it gets some, especially because this is still fairly early on in the runtime and there’s the hope the film will grapple with the culture, but no, it’s more of the same. They have a fight over a beloved coffee mug that has a gun on it and the camera focuses on a Polaroid where Emma has a finger gun pointing at Charlie. Instead of being a weighty undercurrent that steers the conversations in a meaningful direction, Emma’s secret becomes a source of absurdist comedy.
The Drama is meant to be uncomfortable, and this critique is not opposed to this set-up as a means of exploring the dynamics of a relationship, but there’s no sense that Borgli understands the weight of what he’s writing about. The performances from Zendaya, Pattinson, Haim, and Athie are all immensely commendable. The same can be said for Joshua Raymond Lee’s editing, Arseni Khachaturan’s cinematography, and Daniel Pemberton’s score. These ingredients are honed in and focused to create this horror-esque, dark comedy, but the script leaves them adrift. The Drama provides a series of dramatics, but isn’t interested in engaging with them to get to the heart of this relationship.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, TikTok, YouTube, & Facebook. Check out Movies with My Dad, a podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies and I Think You’ll Hate This, a podcast hosted by two friends who rarely agree.
support your local film critic!
~
support your local film critic! ~
Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.