WARNING: This review contains spoilers.
It’s a great blessing to find a romantic partner who knows the worst thing about you and still wants to be with you. The Drama presents a rather extreme case, and it only succeeds partially. This much is clear: While we’ve all seen comedies about weddings where everything goes to hell, I guarantee that you haven’t seen one like this.
The main story picks up a week before Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a curator for a New York art museum, is scheduled to marry Emma (Zendaya), who works as a librarian in the city. They’re out drinking with Mike and Rachel (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim), the married couple who will serve as their best man and maid of honor, and the subject of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” comes up. The other three have some pretty bad stories, but Emma unfortunately reveals her topper: As a bullied and depressed 15-year-old in Louisiana, she meticulously planned a mass shooting at her high school, going so far as to make a suicide video and bring the firearm to school. Only dumb luck prevented her from carrying it out.
Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli previously directed Dream Scenario with Nicolas Cage, but this film is closer to the edgelord stuff he directed back home like his 2022 comedy Sick of Myself. That one featured a protagonist who went to a hospital because all her skin was peeling off, only for her doctor to call her a bad person. (“You got drunk and made a scene at your boyfriend’s art opening! You repost racist jokes on Twitter! You deserve everything that’s happening to you!”)
Here he tracks the fallout of Emma’s revelation and includes a cheeky nod to Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie, which is in a similar vein. Everyone picks up on the sudden tension between the engaged couple, including co-workers, the florist, the choreographer. They all make it worse without knowing what’s the deal — the wedding photographer (Zoë Winters) briskly tells them, “I’ll shoot you, then I’ll shoot your parents, then I’ll shoot you and your parents.” Emma yells at a motorist who almost runs them over, and Charlie worries about what that means when he might have shrugged it off before. Of course, an art photographer mails Charlie a copy of her coffee-table book featuring pictures of scantily clad women posing with guns.
Our not-so-happy couple don’t exactly help themselves, either. After Rachel ghosts Emma, she retaliates by getting Rachel fired from her contracted advertising gig with the library. (Emma is appalling, but Rachel may just be the worst person here, plotting how to use the information against her at the wedding and holding up a paraplegic cousin whom she barely knows as proof of her own moral superiority.) Inevitably, Charlie the Englishman brings up the idea that Americans are all a bunch of crazed gun nuts who like to go around shooting each other, which does not go over well.
The acting honors surprisingly land on Pattinson, who is quite funny as a guy who’s overwhelmed and suffering a major case of pre-wedding jitters. Charlie’s tasked with firing the wedding DJ (Sydney Lemmon) for her supposed drug use and instead starts crying uncontrollably in front of her. He does that again during his speech at the reception, which Charlie obsessively rewrites until he finally loses control when it comes time to actually give it.
Zendaya does not come off so well here, and the fault appears to be with Borgli’s story, which fails to comment meaningfully on America’s gun culture or the prospect of a woman of color being a mass shooter instead of the stereotypical white male. The Drama works rather better as a cracked love story, where Emma and Charlie’s personality flaws complement one another and make them perfect for each other. If the film had functioned on another level, this might have been fantastic. As it is, it’s a dark comedy about how too much candor can cause havoc in a relationship. Borgli is now learning that lesson in his own personal life, with the resurfacing of a 2012 essay defending his relationship with a teenager, when he would have been in his late 20s. Unless, of course, he invented that story as an epic act of trolling us. I wouldn’t put it past him.
The Drama
Starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli. Rated R.
