The Drama Review: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's Controversial Wedding Film Delivers on Its Promise
A woman's shocking confession on the eve of her nuptials causes uproar in this insouciantly offensive provocation from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, known for Dream Scenario. This review contains spoilers, so proceed with caution if you wish to avoid narrative details.
Navigating Past Secrets Before the Big Day
How much of your history should you disclose to your adorable fiance before the wedding? Tricky issues are often best avoided in the run-up to the ceremony, but they can be recklessly raised by attractively naive young people who assume the consequences won't be severe. Such a situation forms the core of this contrived yet amusing high-concept, high-anxiety movie, a Euro-satire of American bourgeois aspiration that aims to discomfit and excruciate, echoing the spirit of Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg's Festen.
A Love Story with Ominous Undertones
Charlie, portrayed by Robert Pattinson, is a rumpled and bespectacled young British art historian living in the US. He meets-cute in a coffee shop with the amazing Emma, played by Zendaya. Dazzled by her beauty as she sits reading, Charlie approaches, but because Emma is deaf in one ear and listening to music in the other, she initially doesn't hear his stammeringly diffident attempts at conversation. Charlie, mistaking this for contempt, is mortified. However, the ice is soon broken, a glorious love story begins, and the misunderstanding becomes an uproarious anecdote for the wedding speech.
Borgli injects something ominous into this scene, imposing a psycho-horror style on romcom tropes. The sound design features weird, eerie ambient noises that gulp out to silence, with closeups looming and uneasy, dissonant woodwind figures on the soundtrack. As their wedding day approaches, Charlie and Emma go for a drunken dinner with friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), daring each other to reveal the worst things they've ever done.
A Shocking Revelation Unfolds
At this point, those sensitive to spoilers should look away, as Emma discloses a dark secret. As a 14-year-old, played in flashback by Jordyn Curet, she planned but could not go through with a high-school shooting. Her partial deafness, previously attributed to a poignant infection in infancy, was actually caused by holding her dad's assault rifle too close to her ear while practising shooting in the woods.
Borgli invents an exquisitely horrible, cynical reason for Emma backing out. Just as she reached for the gun hidden in her bag, the school learned of another mass shooting at a local shopping mall, killing a friend. Her plan was upstaged and spoiled, forcing her to abandon it—a denouement that might be admired by Bret Easton Ellis. Emma hopes everyone will overlook this rash revelation or accept her assurance of normalcy now, but everyone is freaked out, unable to unhear what they've heard. Charlie senses their picture-perfect relationship beginning to unravel.
Genre Ambiguity and Social Commentary
The Drama is an insouciantly offensive mashup of two American phenomena: the Hollywood marriage comedy and the high-school shooting. Part of its ingenuity lies in generic ambiguity—is it satire or thriller? The tone in which the secret is presented remains uncertain; its status as a macabre black-comic absurdity hinges on accepting Emma's complete recovery. While female shooters are vanishingly rare compared to males, Borgli's script pre-empts this objection with examples.
Charlie begins to wonder if Emma's latent tendency to violence may resurface. The film makes a serious point that thousands of secret near-murderers likely walk among us, having pivoted back to normality. However, it slightly falters in depicting the aftermath of the non-crime, such as teenage Emma's behavior in the weeks and months after the actual shooting that stole her thunder. Charlie remains unconvinced, comparing it to Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, though it offers a kind of reassuring sense of her past and identity.
Conclusion and Release Details
The ending sees Borgli losing his nerve a bit, but overall, The Drama boasts the spiky, ingenious, tasteless style of his previous film Dream Scenario, surpassing his unsubtle narcissism comedy Sick of Myself. It delivers a provocation, a jeu d'esprit of outrage, and a psychological meltdown articulated more astutely than in many solemnly intended films. True to its title, The Drama is out in Australia on 2 April and in the UK and US on 3 April.
