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‘The Drama’ review: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s darkly funny Boston movie is designed to discomfort
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's darkly funny new movie is designed to provoke and unnerve with its audacity.
The best thing I can say about “The Drama,” the new dark comedy filmed in Boston starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, is that I can’t stop thinking about “The Drama.”
Director Kristoffer Borgli’s brief filmography is almost entirely dedicated to questioning social norms and lampooning the hypocrisy of cancel culture, most recently in the 2023 Nicolas Cage film “Dream Scenario.”
Given his biggest budget to date and two A-list actors as willing accomplices, Borgli has purpose-built “The Drama” to provoke, unnerve, and leave you wondering if you’re allowed to laugh at its audacity.
“The Drama” begins in a nameless coffee shop (it’s the Back Bay location of Tatte in real life), where Pattinson’s England-born art curator Charlie Thompson spies Zendaya’s literary editor Emma Harwood reading a book called “The Damage” by Harper Ellison. Charlie hasn’t read the book – which doesn’t actually exist in the real world, and may in fact be a subtle hint at a future Borgli project. But he quickly skims reviews of the book on Goodreads so he can approach Emma and talk to her.
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During their first date (filmed at Eastern Standard), Charlie gets caught in a lie: He still hasn’t read the book, and can’t pretend any longer. Emma, who belongs to a generation obsessed with identifying and cataloguing red flags in their dating lives, could easily cut bait at this point. Instead, she tells Charlie to reintroduce himself and start over.
A couple years after this tone-setting scene, Charlie and Emma are one week away from their wedding, finalizing their reception menu with Charlie’s best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and his wife Rachel (Alana Haim). After several generous pours of the caterer’s wine, Rachel drunkenly suggests they each share the worst things they have ever done.
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How each of the four respond to this question – both in what they say and how they say it – is illuminating. Mike is reticent and regretful. Rachel can barely contain her glee. Charlie brushes his off with a rueful grin and a “kids will be kids” shrug. Emma, after a huge swig of wine, is earnest and straightforward. But what she says (which I will not spoil here) immediately and irrevocably shifts the group dynamic.
As someone who has seen thousands of movies and knew that “The Drama”’s plot centered around the reddest of red flags, the nature of Emma’s darkest secret still genuinely shocked me. Borgli is exploring the limits of what is allowed to be discussed in polite society and what transgressions can or can’t be forgiven. I struggle to think of a more taboo topic that could realistically anchor a mainstream film with two A-list stars without a studio immediately shutting it down in pre-production.
The remainder of “The Drama” is about how its principals move forward post-confession, with every minor interaction in the days leading up to the wedding threatening to derail everything. The film relishes awkward silences and pained expressions, mining humor from the couple’s barely-disguised inner turmoil. In one of the funniest scenes, a beaming wedding photographer (Zoe Winters) encourages Charlie and Emma to “just smile naturally,” later clarifying: “Just like… how you would smile… in life.”
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Pattinson is brilliant as Charlie, slowly morphing from a nebbish, bespectacled expat into a caged animal, pacing up and down the couple’s opulent multi-level Back Bay apartment. He needs Emma to explain herself, not only so he can better understand who he is marrying, but so he can justify to Mike and (especially) Rachel why he’s going through with the wedding.
As Rachel, Haim is deliciously venomous. Despite the fact that she prompted this confessional game (and brashly admitted to a truly heinous deed), she immediately claims the moral high ground. She’s the arbiter of what is and isn’t acceptable trauma, refusing any possibility of penitence or redemption on Emma’s part unless it specifically conforms to the unwritten rules that grown-up mean girls like her invented. It’s no coincidence that Charlie and Rachel, the two white, well-off characters, can laugh away their misdeeds and are the ones who ultimately convene to decide Emma’s fate.
It would have been nice if Borgli had spent a little more time exploring the “why” of what Emma went through, and his attempt to fill in the gaps with flashbacks leaves a few too many questions unanswered. Zendaya plays her part well, though: Emma looks and plays the part of a dream wife, but she can’t hide her desperation after briefly letting her mask drop.
In both 2022’s “Sick of Myself” (about a woman who fakes a medical malady for attention) and “Dream Scenario” (about a college professor who inexplicably begins appearing in millions of people’s dreams), Borgli takes big swings while attempting to diagnose society’s ills, but ultimately fails to tell a complete story by the time the credits roll. In that regard, “The Drama” represents a significant step forward. Even the sturdiest couple’s wedding days are high-stress affairs, so it’s no surprise that Charlie and Emma’s climactic nuptials are a powder keg waiting to blow.
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The only thing that feels unrealistic about the film’s conclusion, which includes a pivotal scene shot at Andy’s Diner in Porter Square, is the ludicrous idea that a greasy spoon in Cambridge would be open past midnight – or that the couple’s Back Bay pad is “two blocks” from it. But these are trivial issues in a film with more hangups and complexes than the Freud Museum. “The Drama” is a film that will undoubtedly launch a million thinkpieces. Unlike similarly-themed predecessors like “After the Hunt,” it will fully deserve every drop of ink that is spilled.
Rating: *** (out of 4)
“The Drama” will be released in theaters on April 3.
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