Divisive by nature, director Kristoffer Borgli delivers yet another successfully strange story about identity with The Drama. This time, it’s presented in deceivingly shiny packaging with a ticking time bomb waiting quietly inside. There was a point in the film when the situation finally clicked for me. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) asks his coworker what she would do if her partner confessed the same secret as Emma (Zendaya) did to him. I pretended Robert Pattinson was talking to me (as one does). Imagining my partner telling me that same confession, my heart sank. This review omits the specifics of Emma’s secret so you can have your own visceral reaction to the bewildering dilemma that is The Drama.
Similar to 2025’s Die My Love, the film’s two megastar leads are tempting bait for a wide net of moviegoers. With big names and pretty faces like Zendaya and Pattinson, it’s fair to say some unsuspecting viewers may be coming to The Drama expecting a very different type of film. For better or worse, there’s no doubt Borgli deftly subverts all expectations.
The film begins with Charlie reminiscing on the early days of his relationship with Emma, as he prepares his wedding speech. Their love story appears harmless enough at first. Once the fiancées get together with some friends for a food-and-wine tasting, the romance is thrown out the window, and the film goes off the rails. Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) propose that the group share the worst thing they’ve ever done. After a round of mild misdemeanors from the others, Emma drunkenly drops an atomic bomb of a secret, sending irreversible ripples into her relationship. Shaken, Charlie erratically grasps at the fringes of his relationship with the Emma he once knew.
In another frenzied turn from Pattinson, Charlie’s hopeless romanticism quickly erodes. Pattinson plays the polite museum curator with a quiet desperation that transforms into manic paranoia. At times reminiscent of his pressure-cooker performance in Good Time (2017), he once again effectively infuses the audience with dread and panic. After Emma’s shocking secret, an inner turmoil begins to ooze from the edges of Charlie’s psyche. Pattinson brings the frantic, urgent energy that the gravity of the subject matter desperately needs.
The Drama is Borgli’s third film as director-writer-editor. He returns with his signature style of dark humor from Sick of Myself (2022) and Dream Scenario (2023). In his third feature, Borgli’s absurdist writing contains a Seinfeld-esque center – like he’s making an exaggerated shrug, saying, “What’s the deal with *insert taboo subject*?” He frames the dark humor with jolty, staccato editing made up of quick cuts and narrative jumping. It all blends to create the equivalent of a cinematic cold plunge when you were expecting a hot tub.
Despite Emma’s secret, the wedding week continues. Combining the materialistic matters of wedding planning with a dark subject makes for a jarring journey. For every convention of typical romance movies, Borgli disrupts the pattern with something askew. Like putty, Borgli shapes Charlie and Emma into something unexpected: an explosive vehicle to explore big questions. As Borgli pulls at the threads of this picture-perfect couple, quickly unraveling, he’s also yanking at the fiber of a facet of American culture so rotten that it can taint something as beautiful as marriage.
Under the guise of a romance-drama, Borgli pokes his finger at the Big Problem of America. In doing so, he creates a predicament that somehow simultaneously feels far-fetched yet inevitable. This American problem has oscillated between rarity and commonplace for so long that it’s reached an unfortunate equilibrium. Will Borgli’s movie do anything to disrupt the pattern? While creatively risky and tackling a subject many are afraid to, it doesn’t go all the way with its condemnation. It’s more of a mirror than a window. We see the problem – but how do we move past it? You could argue that acknowledgment is the first step. But I’m not sure satire should be the second.
While Charlie desperately tries to make sense of Emma’s confession, he mumbles a quote from Sigmund Freud. It’s a line that’s easy to miss but one that connects the fibers of Emma’s past with today’s present: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Review Courtesy of Kasey Dunifer
Feature Image Credit to A24