The Drama Review

In the middle of rehearsing the first dance for her wedding, Emma starts to wonder if it isn’t too performative to have an elaborately planned choreography. “A wedding is performative by nature,” the choreographer retorts. And so the stage is set for The Drama, the latest dark comedy from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, in which Emma (Zendaya) and her fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson) find their perceptions of each other tested by a scandal from the past.

We’re introduced to the couple at hand as Charlie practices his wedding speech with best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie), the highlights of their relationship playing out in staccato flashbacks onscreen: their “meet-cute” at a coffee shop, where Charlie fumbles through an introduction to Emma by pretending to have read the book she has with her; the first date where she calls him out for not actually having read it; their first kiss, Emma’s laugh, everything he loves about her. It’s a sweet, amusing introduction establishing their dynamic: Emma as the funny, confident American, Charlie as the slightly bumbling but charming Brit. 

They’re the perfect couple, with no stumbling blocks in sight—at least until, under the influence of several bottles of wine and spurred by the sight of the wedding DJ doing drugs on a street corner, Mike, his wife Rachel (Alana Haim), Charlie and Emma decide to share the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie, ever the affable chap, struggles to come up with even one bad thing. But it’s when Emma shares a story from her high school years that things devolve.

Suffice to say that here Borgli furthers his penchant for mining uncomfortable humor out of transgressive topics. Emma’s secret is bad enough that Rachel, also her maid of honor, stops answering her calls, and Charlie—already established as the nervous type—spirals with anxiety that the real Emma might be the one from her past, not the one he knows now. Pattinson is typically excellent in these screwball-type roles, and he brings strong physical comedy to Charlie’s character, whether he’s literally folding into himself with shame or bouncing off the walls with nerves. Zendaya balances out his frenetic energy with the much more sympathetic Emma, buffeted by Charlie’s paranoid inability to take her at her word.

As a character study of Charlie and a thought experiment on relationships, The Drama works. The audience gets a front-row seat to Charlie’s anxieties as Borgli twists reality: we see nightmares of a bloody wedding, Charlie’s expectations of a scenario versus the actual events that play out, and shots of Charlie with a teenage Emma (Jordyn Curet) in place of adult Emma. It’s fascinating to watch his descent into obsession, particularly as so much of his doubts center on what others might think if they knew about Emma’s past. Haim is self-righteously outraged as Rachel, delivering a holier-than-thou reaction to Emma’s confession that colors Charlie’s own. In one scene, Charlie poses a hypothetical of the situation to his delightfully blasé colleague Misha (Hailey Benton Gates); when her take is less forgiving than he wants it to be, he loses it even further. Instead of trusting Emma and their relationship, Charlie becomes wrapped up in the context of her past and how that might reflect on himself.

The Drama does tender sensitive subject matter as the backdrop for its characters’ antics, and there are social connotations to Emma’s actions that the movie doesn’t fully deal with when it comes to her race and gender. But the inciting incident is less a reflection on Emma’s character and more an opportunity to make a farce out of performances in and outside of relationships. With its marriage of whip-smart dialogue, darkly satiric themes and a finely honed direction, Borgli’s best effort yet is the romantic-dramedy we deserve.

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