Summary of this article
The Drama stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a newly betrothed couple whose relationship takes a hit after a shocking revelation.
It is directed by Kristoffer Borgli.
The tonal balancing act works to mixed results.
Early in The Drama, two couples confess the worst thing they have ever done. Stakes are higher for Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), for they are on the cusp of a wedding. The admissions of their friends, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) play out as mild repentances. Charlie glibly evades honesty, whereas Emma's confession sends shockwaves, flipping the room's temperature. To divulge it would be to give away the film’s kernel, but there’s something inherently manipulative about a film piggybacking on a core reveal as its engine.
Brazenly, The Drama does hinge on provocation. There's the one key disclosure casting everything in a new, grim light. But we keep wondering if the shock is ever earned. It’s like one of those niggling thoughts in the back of the mind that gains and twists and doesn’t reach anywhere potent. Does it actually translate the endless mysteries one contains? Can we ever truly know our close ones? Borgli yearns to be scabrous and cutting. The Drama vaults off being risible and reprehensible. This balance doesn't always cohere. At least, Borgli smartly stages the meet-cute, the probably doomed couple’s early flirtation. When Emma confides to Rachel her first crush and love was Charlie, she’s met with disbelief. Surely, that cannot be true since she’s almost thirty. What Borgli does is take this wave of scepticism to its extreme, widen the chasms that open up between people who thought they know each other. In the wake of grotesque revelations, how do we make our way back to the once-beloved?
The problem is Borgli gets too caught up in overstating, re-stressing prior assertions. The once-inseparable couple finds itself at loggerheads. Charlie, the one to first approach Emma, can no longer trust her. Zendaya is saddled with a role wherein she spends the entire film explaining, pleading she’s no more the person who came close to the pivotal ghastly act. The Drama would like to pretend it’s wicked, caustic and biting in skewering a relationship. However, the rockiness in the dynamic gets offset by pointless, self-defeating perambulation. When the film does hit the stem, the outcomes are frankly juvenile. Borgli circles a couple staring at seemingly irreconcilable truths, those never meant to be shared. When they accidentally slip out, how do people keep going? How far can this faith travel? These, however, are just few of the many, unwieldy questions the film scampers through.
Most of the heavy-lifting in The Drama is left to Pattinson. He gets this whole emotional journey to go on, though it’s a questionably puerile one. His face darkens amidst the morbid discoveries while he tries to contain his horror. The film has an inclination to put him through repetitive self-flagellation without mining something revelatory about his responses to Emma’s confession.
Ultimately, however, even he is stretched thin by degrees of bewilderment he can muster. Poor Zendaya remains trapped within perception. Borgli's screenplay tosses her a backstory most facile and oblivious to a strong racialised vein it alludes. Zendaya valiantly tries to inject desperation but is beset with unforgivably thin, lame writing that mistakes backstory for entire characterisation. Bizarre inclusions abound as we get windows into teenage Emma, her big personality switch handled with glaring irresponsibility. In the backwash of Borgli’s past relationship with a minor coming to light, it grows difficult to measure and sit with imaginatively interposed sequences of the adult Charlie cuddling teenage Emma. It’s tricky to discuss the ramifications of certain integral choices. Nevertheless, there’s no escaping the misjudgements, fluctuating from teenage Emma’s distorted fantasies of empowerment to Charlie’s projections of her continuing messed-up mind. There’s something lurid and incredibly problematic about Borgli’s situating and juxtaposing such delusions and troubled imaginings. The Drama takes a stab at the heart of darkness in contemporary America’s youth, but gets lost within the edgy barbs, its overeager imploration of squirmy comedy.
It takes a whip-smart storyteller to keep the cards in order in such a amorally crooked narrative as this. Borgli keeps the motors shifting between diabolical humour and utter sincerity. The Drama perches on uncomfortable chuckles, veering right before a grimace. Borgli deploys a killer setup. The beginning flashes with promise of a sharp voice. But increasingly, it's drowned by a simultaneous mix of unnecessary dodginess and tone-deaf depiction. The Drama buries itself in wild, intemperate lurches and jarring edits. Some of it is effective in the early stretches but it gradually turns distracting to the point it just cannot mask bland provocation. The Drama belongs to the brood of films that seeks to disrupt convention and genre tropes, but finally gets subsumed in its own jaundiced, half-committed trap.
