Kristoffer Borgli’s latest film, The Drama, is a high-concept, high-anxiety Euro-satire that blends the Hollywood marriage comedy with the grim reality of high-school shootings. Starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, the film sets out to discomfit and excruciate in the spirit of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen.
The story follows Charlie (Pattinson), a rumpled British art historian based in the US, who meets the dazzling Emma (Zendaya) in a coffee shop. Their meet-cute involves a misunderstanding due to Emma’s partial deafness, but soon a glorious love story begins. However, Borgli imposes a psycho-horror style on the romcom tropes, with eerie sound design and unsettling visuals.
As their wedding day approaches, Charlie and Emma go for a drunken dinner with friends, where they dare each other to reveal their worst deeds. Emma confesses that as a 14-year-old (played in flashback by Jordyn Curet) she planned a high-school shooting but backed out when another mass shooting occurred at a local mall, killing a friend. Her partial deafness, she reveals, was caused by holding her father’s assault rifle too close to her ear while practising shooting.
The film is an insouciantly offensive mashup that questions how much of one’s past should be revealed before marriage. It makes the serious point that there are probably thousands of people like Emma walking among us: secret near-murderers who pivoted back to normality. However, the film slightly falls down in exploring the aftermath of Emma’s non-crime, and Borgli may lose his nerve a bit at the ending.
Overall, The Drama has the spiky, ingenious, tasteless style of Borgli’s previous film Dream Scenario, and offers a provocation that delivers on its promise.
