Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson)’s relationship is derailed when a revelation from the past emerges, days before their wedding.
If you’re a blissfully happy couple looking forward to the long life you’ll spend together with your soulmate, hanging an Ingmar Bergman poster in your fussily Millennial-chic apartment is just asking for trouble. Early in Kristoffer Borgli’s relationship farce The Drama, engaged sweethearts Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) sit down for dinner with their married friends. A game of What’s The Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done? is played. After everyone else is done sharing their darkest secrets, Emma offers up something that throws the entire dinner — and the next few days leading up to the nuptials — into the kind of chaos that would have your average wedding-planner threatening to jump from the highest rooftop.
Said revelation is expertly engineered to bait an entire spectrum of responses from the characters, as well as from the audience. Emma and Charlie’s friend Rachel (a razor-sharp Alana Haim) is disgusted. Her husband Mike (soft-spoken Mamoudou Athie) attempts to give the whole situation the benefit of the doubt. Emma wishes it would all just blow over. Charlie searches desperately for an outside opinion he can parrot as his own, his reserved Englishness rejecting what is, in his view, Emma’s uniquely American sin. It’s hard to describe just how nimbly deployed this revelation is without actually revealing it here, but audience reactions are likely to run a similar gamut. Your mileage may vary.
It’s a testament to Borgli’s skill as a writer and director that the big reveal is not the movie’s main focus. It’s the driving force behind everything that comes after, sure, but The Drama is more interested in tracking how people deal (or fail to deal) with finding out their loved ones are maybe not who they seem to be, the little ways in which we punish each other for not acting the way we should, the abject humiliation of putting your partnership on display for all to see and scrutinise, and determining whether or not any of that even matters. Relationships — familial, romantic, platonic — are built on a foundation of tiny decisions, and if those decisions start to crumble, the whole thing comes crashing down. The drama of The Drama is visible in every uncomfortable stutter, every moment of avoided eye contact, every back turned instead of consolation offered. You can pinpoint the exact moment when the central couple hits a decisive, defining crossroads for their future. You can pinpoint the exact moment when they both realise it, too.
As dark as it gets, it is often hilarious.
Zendaya and Pattinson both thrive in this environment, relishing the kind of dialogue exchanges you want to watch through your fingers. Emma is woefully unprepared for her past to come back and haunt her, especially by her own doing. Charlie is completely adrift without a model on which to mirror his heretofore charmed life, and the pureness of his panic shocks even himself. Together, they’re a total disaster when real cracks start to show in their partnership. Borgli traps them in glamorous close-ups that reveal every flinch.
Few aspects of modern relationships and wedding culture go un-skewered here. In another early scene, Emma and Charlie are berated by the world’s meanest choreographer while rehearsing for their first dance. In yet another, they have an eyeroll-inducing debate about the performativity of marriage. The two have perfectly trendy (and perfectly vague) jobs as a book editor and a museum curator — jobs that somehow allow them to afford their perfectly trendy apartment outfitted with perfectly trendy bedside-table-lamps, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Glossier skincare products, and the aforementioned Bergman poster. They seem like sweet people, but you also kind of want to watch them suffer.
The film certainly delivers on that front. As dark as it gets, it is often hilarious in that cruel, keen way that Borgli has proved to be a specialist. It bends towards the same arch cringe comedy that he explored in his fantastic second feature Sick Of Myself, an equally dark dramedy about a woman so jealous of her partner’s successes she obsessively and loudly fakes a severe illness. The characters in The Drama are similarly bound by their basest compulsions, tripping over themselves trying to reconcile what they want with what they think everyone around them expects. What better way to describe a wedding?
A dark and darkly funny dissection of a couple’s ‘perfect’ relationship, examining how internal forces and exterior pressures can drive two people to their breaking point.
