The Drama has every aspect of the zeitgeist on lock. Two attractive, buzzy stars in professional odball Robert Pattinson (utterly committed post-Twilight to playing freaky guys up to weird stuff), and the more media-trained Zendaya (who may have had her own secret wedding to partner Tom Holland recently). A marketing campaign that generated fevered curiosity without reaching Marty Supreme-levels of oversaturation. The promise of an A24-worthy twist that mainly fuelled said fevered curiosity. And a simple premise that throws a hand grenade into the toxic stew that is the current cultural discourse.
Pattinson plays Charlie, a bumbling Brit in America engaged to be wed to the charming Emma (Zendaya). But an ill-advised game dinner party confessionals in the run-up to their nuptials throws a psychological spanner in the works. Emma is, as Charlie puts it in his draft wedding speech, the person who turns his dramas into a comedy, with her revolting-but-cute laugh and tendency to pants him when he’s getting too worked up over something. And as we know from the theatrical tradition, if a drama ends in a wedding, it’s a comedy; death means it’s a tragedy.
Writer and director Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario; Sick of Myself) feints at suggesting it could be Charlie that’s the secret nutter. His meet-cute with Emma involves him bothering a woman reading alone in public (indefensible), and maintaining a lie that he’s actually read the same book all the way to their first date. Emma, deaf in one ear, initially doesn’t register his pathetic chat-up line, and calmly directs him to start the scene again from the top. Beautiful and funny, you wonder why she’s entertaining this neurotic goofball, let alone engaged to him – although Pattinson and Zendaya truly sell the audience on their easy chemistry.
If having a boyfriend is cringe, as Chanté Joseph decreed in Vogue, marrying a man is even more embarrassing these days. The heterosexual wedding as a locus of horror is all around, in the current Netflix series Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, and in the return of the ultimate wedding-as-horror-scenario flick Ready or Not 2. Borgli neatly subverts and skewers this with the aforementioned twist.
Surprise! It’s actually Emma who has the ‘worst’ secret, and Charlie and his friends freak out that he may be about to marry a monster. Well, at least someone who had monstrous ideations. Yes, the twist in the film is indeed the same one that ‘leaked’ online/was deduced by fans through close reading of the casting calls months ago. I’d been holding out hope it was a fake-out planted by the film studio to preserve the ‘real’ twist. But the subject is handled with such balls-to-the-wall commitment that, honestly, even going in ‘spoiled’ myself didn’t spoil it.
*** Spoilers ahead ***
Here it is: a teenage Emma, isolated after her military family moves to Louisiana, depressed and bullied at her new school, becomes enamoured with the aesthetic of school shooters. She planned it out – we see a child actor version of Zendeya posing in goth eyeliner and recording a webcam manifesto – and had her father’s rifle packed and ready to go. It was a test fire that blew out her eardrum and left her partially deaf. Yes, her grim plan was thwarted, but only because someone else shot up the mall and killed a fellow student. In the aftermath of public grieving, she ends up being invited to join a student anti-gun lobby and becomes a passionate campaigner. It’s shocking and, honestly, very funny.
Emma’s secret catapults the film into an even more controversial conversation that America can’t seem to resolve. One that was, frustratingly, only alluded to in the much-hyped 2025 horror hit Weapons. Borgli is prepared to really poke the hornet's nest with The Drama and create art that disturbs and delights in the process. Every liberal foible is ripe for skewering, down to the Isamu Noguchi Akari series lamp on Charlie’s bedside table.
Emma is, frankly, the most well-adjusted of any of them. Charlie’s clumsy attempts to understand his betrothed’s perspective send him into a tailspin, and the potential for drama on the big day starts snowballing. Their once-banging sex life is curtailed by his fearful inability to maintain an erection, while he furtively fantasises about Emma in her underwear and caressing a weapon. Meanwhile, sanctimonious maid-of-honour Rachel (Alana Haim of the sister band Haim, wonderfully insufferable here), whose cousin was disabled by a school shooting, is also poised to cause trouble. By the time the wedding party starts to implode, you begin to wish Emma still had that gun.
It’s cringe-inducing and gross-out in places (join my own campaign for filmmakers to stop shooting endless projectile puking as a metaphor for emotion), but artfully shot, interestingly edited and set to some of the freakest flute toots in arthouse cinema. The ending scene is genuinely romantic and feels like something out of a cult classic movie. It’s some delicious drama that will hopefully outlive whatever outrage the subject matter is duly generating.
The Drama is in cinemas from April 3
