“The Drama” is this month’s culture war-adjacent whatsit from studio A24. All the ingredients are here: a rising director, hip actors, nervous editing rhythms (so that you know you are watching an art movie) and a high concept, meant to be scandalous, which sits there undigested. A few more movies like this and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli will be well on his way to becoming the next Yorgos Lanthimos or Alex Garland.
Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are preparing to marry. They met when he stumbled upon Emma while she was reading in a coffee shop. Eager to talk to her, Charlie lies about having read the book she is reading, though his shtick is literally falling on a deaf ear, as she lost the use of one of her ears as a child. They work through it and other meet-cute adventures they later recall as they write their wedding toasts.
At this point in the movie, the cliches are intentional, as Borgli is settling you in for a rom-com gone wrong. They are meant to lower your guard for his big idea, and “The Drama” benefits initially from the charm of its actors.
It is a relief to hear Pattinson in his natural voice after so many gimmicky accents. Pattinson has authority here in the kind of role that Hugh Grant played in the 1990s, as the awkward Brit in over his head with a woman. Zendaya is lovely with sharp timing, and she meshes well with Pattinson, though “The Drama” is single-mindedly his movie.
Other rom-com cliches surface. The leads are afforded a best friend or two so that they have someone to discuss the plot with, so the filmmakers have an easy device for dispensing exposition. Given that it marries the insularity of rom-coms with self-conscious A24 movies, “The Drama” practically feels like it is on a backlot.
The movie was shot in Boston, but Borgli has no interest in the city. We see the occasional Cambridge Art Museum prop because Charlie works there doing … something, while Emma works in a bookstore. They live in a chic and open apartment that in any modern American city would cost thousands of dollars a month in rent. Money, the ultimate taboo of modern movies, is never mentioned here.
These contrivances exist in most romantic comedies. And, lest I sound like a hopeless pedant, I know that most people do not go to rom-coms to be reminded of the bills they cannot pay. I don’t either, for that matter. But “The Drama” is not meant to be an unpretentious vacation from your troubles. It wants to be confrontational. Whether we are talking art or pop cinema, I am sick to death of movies with no sense of living texture.
“The Drama” is a star vehicle with the easy signifiers of a Hollywood movie that wants extra credit for its big concept, and it is soon evident that the cliches here are not being parodied by Borgli but rather leaned on. It is time to discuss the movie’s twist, which occurs at the end of the first act. If you want to be surprised, now is the time to get coffee.
Charlie and Emma are sampling potential foods and wines for their wedding with their married friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), when their talk becomes a parlor game: What is the worst thing that you ever did?
Rachel and Mike’s answers are worse than you expect them to be, but Emma’s response shuts down the evening and potentially the wedding: she claims that she planned a school shooting when she was a child, going as far as to film online manifestos and carry her father’s rifle to class, only to abandon the plot last minute. Her right ear is deaf from firing said rifle too close to her head when she was in target practice.
Does anyone believe that a person capable of contemplating mass murder as a child could shrug it off and turn into Zendaya? To give Borgli the benefit of the doubt, the contrivance is the point, even if the purpose of that point is unclear.
This twist could tweak the gender-classist associations connected to children alienated enough to murder their classmates and commit suicide by cop. But there is a reason we have presumptions about school shooters: Many do fit stereotypes, probably because many of these killers are shaped by similar socio-economic contexts. None of them are affluent gorgeous women. No attempt is made to make this idea make sense. For Borgli, this is a fanciful “what if?”—an extreme symbol of a lover’s baggage that must be processed.
This premise might work as a barn-burning satire in the spirit of “South Park” at its most unhinged, or as an earnest attempt to imagine what the mind-set of a potential school-shooter may be. “The Drama” is neither. Emma is just a device.
Watching “The Drama,” I thought of a movie that works as a satire and as an act of empathetic imagination: Todd Solondz’s 1998 scandal “Happiness,” which offers a portrait of a pedophile. Solondz does not shirk away from the ugliness of his subject matter. He spends time with the character, considering the man’s resentments and agonies and monstrosity, dramatizing the toll of this man’s hunger to his family and victims as well as himself. And Solondz has the daring to spring jokes from this material, as the film captures all these textures while also somehow existing as a funhouse sitcom roosted somewhere in the land of John Waters. It is an odd and troubling achievement.
For Borgli, the notion of a school shooter, a central embodiment of modern America’s trauma, is a cocktail joke, and barely even that. Solondz’s movies offend most of the few people who bother to see them. Modern filmmakers seem to want to be just dangerous enough to be cool without paying the price of obscurity or rejection. The modern, trendy boutique art directors are, within their own sphere, as commercial-minded as Marvel.
Parts of the movie are promising. After Emma springs her secret, we see flashbacks to her as a child played by Jordyn Curet (in a sensitive, expressive performance that makes further nonsense of the premise). We see young Emma filming her manifesto on her computer only to be interrupted by those annoying “update” prompts that always seem to kick in on the devices when you are in deepest concentration. This is the one scene in the movie that bridges the mundane of regular life with the horror of the premise. The scene also suggests that for Emma the shooting plot is a fad. Everyone’s doing it, right?
This line of thought might have led Borgli to parodying how we digest school shootings and other traumas, spinning them for political purposes or shrugging them off if they don’t hit us personally. An earlier Borgli film, the uneven but unsettling “Sick of Myself,” went after similar game, parodying how corporations attach themselves to victim narratives for branding purposes.
Instead, Borgli fashions a traditional movie about wedding jitters. Given its plotting, “The Drama” is a shockingly forgettable experience. Cut the big confession at the end of the first act and substitute in a conventional hangup for Charlie to transcend and you would have the same damn movie. This timidity, and flippancy, regarding school shootings is more callous than if Borgli had taken real risks with the material.
Wanting hipster quotient for his pro forma art-fart, Borgli utilizes American trauma as an ideal accessory for Pattinson and Zendaya’s spring reveal.
“The Drama” is in theaters everywhere. Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” (1998) was released on Criterion Collection in 2024 and is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
