It’s a love story for the ages. Two attractive people have a meet-cute at a coffee shop and begin a relationship so loving and comforting that it’s like they were born for each other. They share a romantic moment while sneaking into a museum, move into a nice apartment, and land well-paying jobs that allow them to move into the final stage of their fairy-tale romance: tying the knot.
Of course, you have to look past the holes in this charming relationship to regard Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) as a perfect couple. Their initial meeting would be cute if you ignore that Charlie creepily looks over Emma’s shoulder to see what book she’s reading, quickly looks it up as a failed excuse to talk to her, then gives her a self-pitying apology for bothering her. (The punchline being she never even noticed him at all because of her deaf ear, the other having an earbud in it). Their relationship would be adorable if you ignore that their love is so overwhelming that it causes Emma to have a panic attack at work, realizing that she’s in love with someone for the first time in her 30-year-old life. Their museum adventure would be as romantic as The Notebook if you ignore that Charlie may have trapped Emma in a locked entrance while they are trying to break into the very museum he curates in order to kiss her.
Charlie and Emma seem to have no problem ignoring these potentially concerning signposts in their love. They only realize how off this type of behavior is thanks to their friends Mike (Mamadou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) critiquing their wedding speeches for their upcoming ceremony. Even then, the wedding is less than a week away, and their love for each other can override any questionable decisions either of them have made. Right?
For writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, this growing sense of doubt is what provides an engine to his aptly named dark-rom-com The Drama, expanding his satirist sensibilities to further study the hypocrisies and contradictions that come with human nature. Just when it seemed like the two were destined for a perfect life together, Borgli throws in a wrench that effectively shatters any confidence the lovebirds had for a happily-ever-after. As the two couples take advantage of a wine tasting during their reception planning, Mike and Rachel introduce a game for the four to play.
Prompted to drunkenly confess the worst things they have ever done, Mike, Rachel, and Charlie offer their answers, which range from harmless to questionable at best, until it’s time for Emma to tell her story. And her story – the twist that distributor A24 has marketed so hard to be as shocking and out-of-nowhere as possible – is so bizarre and morbid that it serves as a litmus test for the three. The studio’s determination to hide the twist might be gimmicky, but it works wonders in placing the audience alongside these well-off characters as they try to figure out in real time what to make of this sudden revelation.
Rachel, having personal ties with the subject matter, gets angry at Emma and promptly ignores her after the tasting, planning to step down as her friend’s bridesmaid. Mike tries to keep things calm, despite exhibiting his own discomfort with Emma. And Charlie, the husband-to-be, at first tries to look past this, opting to think of it as a bad time in his fiancée’s life. However, as their wedding day looms, suddenly this childhood incident becomes an ever-sharpening splinter in his love, a threat that will either end their relationship for good or condemn him to living the rest of his life with a potentially unstable psychopath, til death do they part.
Despite making for a compelling look at both a moral dilemma and a character study between a couple learning about their uncomfortable flaws, Borgli only hints at the potential seen in this darkly punchy premise. His script writes in all the comedic potential, including puns and sight gags reflecting Charlie and Emma’s growing neuroticism and distrust of one another, only to pull back on the story’s dramatic weight. With the general premise being a couple finding out secrets they dare not think about, it’s hard not to compare Borgli’s efforts to other films with similar ideas, which only makes The Drama’s flaws more glaring.
With respect to Charlie trying to cope with Emma subverting his perception of her, it’s hard not to think about the more fleshed-out relationship and ambiguity in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In terms of the couple being perceived and judged by other people, the complications and harshness of outsiders enforcing an easy narrative seen in Anatomy of a Fall (2023) and Gone Girl (2014) only makes Borgli’s cringe-comedy attempt at reaching the same height more apparent. The ways that The Drama differs from those films lends it some sense of identity: the plucky Daniel Pemberton score, Joshua Raymond Lee’s scattered editing providing a simulation of how overwhelmed the couple are as their wedding day approaches, or Arseni Khachaturan’s cinematography going back and forth between the extreme close-ups of a paranoia thriller and the wide shots in line with the artsy A24 aesthetic. In the end, however, it all feels empty.
What becomes clearer as the film goes on is that it cares less about where Emma’s bombshell reveal takes the couple and more about fitting a conventional structure. For all the worry and side-eyeing that occur in the wake of this realization, it only serves as a setup that slowly gets ignored as the focus shifts to Charlie’s favor. Whatever revelations Emma might have from being forced to think about that period of her life, and whether that aspect of her is long-dead or a crucial jumping-off point that unconsciously led to a successful adulthood, is sidetracked for the sake of Robert Pattinson getting to do schtick. While he gets to ham things up as Charlie goes through a never-ending nervous breakdown, Zendaya doesn’t get to do anything as expressive.
Despite The Drama clearly trying to provoke audiences, both in subject matter and in its finger-wagging commentary on people getting too hung up on others’ flaws, it doesn’t have the bite needed to truly be transgressive. Even though it had more than enough opportunities to complicate the lovers’ dilemma, it goes for the simple route. In the end, Borgli’s satire is a story of forgiveness, of letting someone redeem themselves through a clean slate, which to some may be a refreshing conclusion and to others an anti-climatic copout. However, with its thorny potential, this resolution feels like a betrayal, as it allows for an easy-to-digest story that prompts audiences to discuss the subject matter at hand, but not anything more complex or uncomfortable. Although the fairy-tale romance is forever destroyed for Charlie and Emma, there is a chance that they still think a dream is just a dream.
The Drama is now playing in theaters everywhere.
