Part rom-com, part satire/drama/thriller, The Drama isn’t quite sure what kind of movie it wants to be but is rescued by a pair of winning performances from Robert Pattinson and Zendaya.
For the first 30 minutes, The Drama plays exactly like the rom-com it presents itself to be on the surface. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) have their charming meet-cute in a café, we see a montage of their budding relationship, and we’re introduced to their entertaining best friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim, being given a bit more to chew on than her extended cameo in One Battle After Another).
Every rom-com trope is unashamedly wielded like an oversized knife, yet this section just feels like a warm hug. Charlie and Emma are no Harry and Sally, but they’re fun! He’s the more neurotic and introverted oddball, she’s the louder and more ‘out there’ extrovert, but they match each other’s freak. Their café meet-cute was several times more interesting than whatever Anyone But You was trying to do, and unlike Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, you can immediately feel the chemistry between Pattinson and Zendaya.
But beneath these positive vibes is a feeling of unease. While Charlie and Emma appear to be truly happy in the lead-up to their wedding, The Drama playfully touches on the idea of how much one should reveal to their partner and whether a relationship can survive a truly cataclysmic truth. It’s not explicitly stated (fortunately), but you can tell from the subtext and the fact that we only get to know Charlie and Emma on a surface level for most of the movie. They’re barely sketches of characters, and this is not something that can be hand-waved away by pre-wedding nerves.
Screenwriter/director Kristoffer Borgli elevates those heady relationship ideas in The Drama with some aesthetically pleasing storytelling, almost to the point of being too much. Rapid-fire cuts between grainy past scenes and crisp present-day moments are strategically used to show Charlie and Emma’s relationship through both the good and the bad. This is then juxtaposed with an extended sequence of Charlie and Emma practicing their choreographed wedding dance. Long, sweeping shots are punctuated with some needle drops as Pattinson and Zendaya put on a very impressive display of dancing. Maybe these crazy kids will make it after all.
Honestly, I would happily take a full 90 minutes of Pattinson and Zendaya playing out all the rom-com greatest hits in a visually gorgeous movie. But alas, this is called The Drama for a reason. When Emma’s big secret (which I won’t spoil and will refer to it in vague terms from here on out) gets exposed at the end of act one, this movie truly becomes ‘the drama’, for better and worse.
The playful rom-com vibe is quickly replaced with something akin to a psychological thriller as all the characters struggle to react to Emma’s big revelation and the subsequent fallout. Unsurprisingly, Charlie struggles to process this new information as everything in his life begins to resemble Emma’s secret, and his gradual psychological unravelling is precisely why you cast Pattinson in a movie like this.
Pattinson’s gung-ho approach to every character he portrays is exactly why he’s one of our best working actors. Charlie isn’t anything we haven’t seen before in a rom-com male lead and could’ve easily been super annoying, yet Pattinson elevates every little tic and quirk to such a fascinating level that you easily buy him as a museum nerd by day and Batman by night. Zendaya is no slouch either, and she matches her co-lead’s energy by going big or dialing things down at just the right moments. When he’s intense, she’s small; when she’s yelling, he’s shrinking away; when he’s forceful, she’s avoidant.
But even those two high-calibre actors can’t help The Drama overcome its confusion over what type of movie it’s attempting to be. In trying to explain the rationale behind Emma’s big secret while clumsily weaving it into the relationship themes introduced earlier, the script loses its focus on which message it wants to convey. As rom-com clichés like miscommunication and overreactions start creeping in, the writing becomes sweatier than Charlie trying to get himself going during sex with Emma as thoughts of his fiancée’s secret wreak havoc on his libido.
Emma’s characterisation is particularly hard done by the uneven writing, as the movie not only has a horrendously cynical explanation for her past, but the way her big secret shaped who she is as an adult doesn’t cleanly fit. It feels like Borgli is trying to jam two diametrically opposing ideas and force it all to work. What starts as a straightforward rom-com ends up becoming a Frankenstein’s monster of satire, drama, and thriller, while not exactly succeeding in any of those genres.
By the time we get to the end of The Drama, the tone is all over the place and whatever serious thing Borgli is trying to say has ironically become lost in a sea of rom-com tropes. Not even Pattinson and Zendaya are quite able to pull off the Richard Linklater-esque wrap-up where it’s clear the moment is meant to be bittersweet, only for it to come off as slightly out of place. This movie only got the vibes right without the underlying emotional core of a Before Midnight or a When Harry Met Sally.
Yet I can’t fault Borgli for his big, ambitious swings and misses. Unlike, say, Wuthering Heights, where it was being provocative for the sake of being provocative, Kristoffer Borgli is trying to shoehorn some heady ideas about relationships, love… and other things in this movie. But at the end of the (wedding) day, I was never bored by this and was charmed throughout by all the performances and the wild mash-up of ideas. Did it work? Not completely, but I respect the effort, and I walked out of the cinema pleasantly entertained as The Drama did ultimately deliver on what was promised by its title in an incredibly roundabout way.
