The Drama ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
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Rom-com’s Final Exam
Rom-coms (once called romantic comedies) are designed to make the couple. Boy meets girl (or some such), and 90 minutes later, they’re ready to spend the rest of their lives together. In the interim, there are inevitably differences to be overcome: differences of social class (“Pretty Woman,” 1990), of distance/location (“Sleepless in Seattle,” 1993), of age (“Between the Temples,” 2024), of personality (“The African Queen,” 1951), as well as differences arising from business rivalry (“You’ve Got Mail,” 1998). No problem. The rom-com’s purpose, its reason for being, is to suture wounds, to overcome differences—to make the couple.
Welcome to the dark rom-com, literally and figuratively.
But what if, asks Norwegian director and writer Kristoffer Borgli (“Dream Scenario,” 2023, with Nicolas Cage), the issue that separates the potential love mates is, like, really, really serious? Can the rom-com still do its work, make its magic? Welcome to the dark rom-com, literally and figuratively. Welcome to “The Drama.”
In the dark setting of what will be the wedding venue, (from right) Rachel (Alana Heim), Emma (Zendaya), and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) play a game—what is the worst thing you've done—that will threaten to break the couple.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) meet in a coffee shop. She’s focused, put together, a bit cold, difficult to read; he’s disheveled, inarticulate, hopelessly romantic. When his first pass fizzles, she offers a way out: “Do you wanna start over?”
Unlike some films, Charlie isn’t alone in what is about to happen to him. He has friends, if one can call them that. Mike (Mamoudou Athie), his best friend and soon to be best man, is amiable if a trifle flaccid—not the kind of guy you’d want in the trenches with you. Mike’s wife, Rachel (Alana Heim, critically acclaimed for her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” 2021), is the stronger partner and, as it turns out, embittered, judgmental, and something of a hothead—among several unpleasant women we’ll meet. In one of many dark scenes (dark walls, dark furniture, low lighting), the two couples assemble and linger around a table, fueled by food and drink. Rachel, breaching a pledge to her husband (an indicator of her flawed morality), encourages everyone to describe the worst thing they ever did. Emma is the last to do so. The story she tells—of her thoughts and actions as a 15-year-old schoolgirl—will dominate the film and threaten the relationship forged not long ago in that coffee shop.
Rachel (Heim) is both the maid of honor and the villain of the piece.
We’ll not reveal what it was that Emma did, or didn’t do, or what might have caused her to do, or not do, whatever she did. The “issue” is not one that can be easily dismissed. The word “psychopath” is used at least twice (by “friends”). Charlie is troubled, traumatized, at sea. While elements of Emma’s account appear to be factual, others are not so obvious. Flashback and cross-cutting create considerable viewpoint ambiguity; at times it’s not clear if what we’re seeing is Emma’s memory or reconstruction of the past, Charlie’s imagination, or an objective perspective that the director wants to share with us. We see Emma slapping Charlie during sex. It seems realistic and in the present, but is it? Does it represent her state of mind now? Or illuminate her 15-year-old self? Or is it Charlie’s fantasy, complicated by the “issue”?
As Charlie (Pattinson, left) and Emma (Zendaya) practice their wedding dance, Emma pronounces it "performative."
Emma will not be of much help in assuaging Charlie’s doubts; as the character Emma and as the actress Zendaya, she’s somewhat impassive and guarded, more a Rorschach test for Charlie and the audience than a woman taking charge of a difficult moment in her life. Rachel’s take—that what Emma did was heinous and unforgivable, and cause for Charlie to abandon the idea of a life together—is not entirely unreasonable. But because Rachel is presented as an unlikeable character, it’s fair to say that Borgli is not suggesting that viewers adopt her perspective. The truth, if it’s to be had at all, lies elsewhere.
Like many couples (including 2 Film Critics), they are bound by their “origin story,” the story they tell.
Viewers will have plenty to chew on with regard to the issue. Yet it may be more productive to focus on how Borgli develops the screenplay to allow for the possibility that Emma and Charlie might transcend the quandary and stay together. Like many couples (including 2 Film Critics), they are bound by their “origin story,” the story they tell (his telling it opens the film), and will tell, of how they came together. That narrative has several elements, including Charlie’s pretending to have read the book she’s reading when he first noticed her and then confessing his duplicity. But its essence is “wanna start over?”, suggesting erasure of the past, a line Emma offered in their first scene and comes with an obvious utility under the circumstances.
Charlie (Pattinson) foregoes his "groom" speech for authenticity. It will not go well.
Also facilitating the work of this rom-com—that is, Charlie’s re-embrace of the tainted Emma—is the idea of performance, the word itself a reference to the film’s title. In the first and last scenes, and one in between, Emma encourages performance, inviting Charlie to have another go at the flirtation that kicks off their romance, suggesting that together they perform that ritual to rekindle what they once had. Indeed, when Charlie comes up with the term “meet-cute”—first used by director Ernst Lubitsch to describe the initial encounter of characters played by Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert in a 1938 screwball comedy—to define their coffee-shop encounter, he frames himself as a character in a rom-com.
The script presents performance as an inferior, less than authentic, form of interaction.
Otherwise, the script presents performance as an inferior, less than authentic, form of interaction, starting with the little white lie that he’s read the book she’s reading. The brittle, sequential game Rachel initiates, and that brings to light Emma’s past, violates the comfortable, organic nature of true friendship. When the couple takes dancing lessons in preparation for their wedding, Emma pronounces the process as too “performative.” “That’s what weddings are,” responds the instructor, another irritating woman. At a rehearsal with the wedding photographer, neither Emma nor Charlie is able to perform the affect that will be required when the day comes. In the dark, wood-paneled venue for the wedding banquet, Charlie strays from his carefully prepared “groom” remarks to offer something more intimate. Mid-film, Charlie poignantly refuses to participate in Emma’s premature effort to perform their origin story (“Let’s start over”….”I can’t”). Although personal authenticity would seem to have little to do with Charlie coming to terms with Emma’s 15-year-old indiscretion, in the arc of the story it’s essential to beginning, maintaining, and in the end, making, the couple.
“The Drama” is nothing less than a stress test for the rom-com genre.
The film has some rough edges. The knife scene is cheap. Charlie’s confrontation with Rachel’s wheelchair-bound cousin in a mid-town intersection is close to senseless. Rachel is too much of a jerk to be taken seriously as the major antagonist. And there’s too much vomiting as a stand-in for authentic reactions. Still, “The Drama” is nothing less than a stress test for the rom-com genre, a final exam for a cinema staple that for almost a century has proven capable of resolving every conflict put to it. Pattinson (instead of the “Twilight” series’ earnest vampire, he charmingly channels young Hugh Grant) is perfect as the tormented, confused romantic, confronted with an unexpected dose of years-old, unreliable reality. Like her character in “Challengers” (2024), and despite the focus on what she did or didn’t do at 15, Zendaya is more object than subject, though more than adequate as the somewhat removed, enigmatic center of attention.
In an era characterized by horrific problems that seem to have no solutions—senseless wars, daily gun violence, a selfish, corrupt, authoritarian President destroying our democracy—director Borgli offers a hard-core version of the hallowed Hollywood rom-com, a perverse metaphor for our time, with its own insoluble dilemma at its core. Can the couple survive? Will the nation endure?
He says: I was sure that the rom-com had been tapped out, drained of its creative energy. Then along comes Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama.” A metaphor for the age.
She says: Please don’t tell me the rom-com is dead!
Date: 2026
Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Heim, Mamoudou Athie
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 105 minutes
Other Awards: 2 nominations to date