There are films you watch with a sense of unease, not because they’re scary, but because they tackle uncomfortable topics. Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama” definitely falls into this category. It’s supposedly a love story, supposedly a couple on the verge of marriage it’s all familiar territory. And yet, something feels off from the very beginning. And it never quite clicks until the very end.
Because while cinema has long conditioned us to see marriage as the ultimate triumph of love, *Borgli* does something far more interesting: it treats it as a flashpoint. Emma and Charlie, played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, aren’t so much heading toward a shared future as they are slowly discovering that their shared present rests on rather fragile foundations. And that’s where the real show begins.
There are no major betrayals or dramas in the traditional sense in this film. Instead, we get something much more subtle and therefore more unsettling: small cracks. Innocent questions. Jokes that aren’t quite jokes. Situations where one person says something “offhand,” and the other starts to wonder if they’ve just heard something very important.
Sound familiar? Exactly.
“Drama” is at its most powerful when it stops being a movie about someone and starts to resemble something we’ve seen somewhere before perhaps not on screen, but closer to home. Borgli seems to suggest that the greatest tensions in relationships don’t stem from catastrophes, but from little things that take on meaning over time.
And the wedding? Well, here it looks a bit like a well-directed play. There’s a script, there are costumes, there’s stress, and there are huge production costs but the meaning somehow gets lost. The characters do everything “by the book,” but not once do they stop to ask: why, exactly? Maybe because the answer might be uncomfortable.
For better or worse, it all plays out brilliantly, mainly thanks to the actors. Pattinson plays a man desperately trying to make sense of reality, even as it stubbornly slips away from him. There’s something tragicomic about him: the more he tries to control things, the more he loses his footing.
Zendaya does the opposite. Her Emma doesn’t so much slip out of control as she simply doesn’t see the need for it at all. Capricious, provocative, at times disarmingly honest, and a moment later disturbingly cold, she is compelling precisely because she cannot be confined to any single definition. And perhaps that is the point.
Because “Drama” very cleverly suggests an idea that is usually avoided in romantic stories: that it is not similarity that builds tension between people, but difference. He wants rules; she undermines them. He counts his steps; she dances without rhythm. He tries to understand; she prefers to experience.
Borgli further heightens the tension through his use of cinematography. The camera movement is often jittery, as if something bad is about to happen. Sound can lose its source, bounce off a wall, and return with a delay much like words in an argument that arrive too late or in a distorted form. The characters hear each other, but they don’t necessarily understand one another.
Familiar symbols also flicker in the background echoes of Psycho, for instance, or the scene at In-N-Out Burger, that famous spot where half of Hollywood ends up after the Oscars. These are subtle signals that Borgli isn’t just telling a story, but also playing with the mythology of cinema and its rituals.
Yet the most interesting thing about “Drama” is something else.
It’s a film about how much we need illusions about another person, about ourselves, about love. And how difficult it is to function when that illusion begins to crack. Because the truth, though it sounds noble, is in practice often simply uncomfortable. And sometimes downright unbearable.
That’s why the most unsettling thought this film leaves you with is this: maybe without all that “drama” the tension, the arguments, the emotional rollercoasters relationships would simply fall apart. Maybe we need those little explosions just to feel anything at all.
And that’s when things get really uncomfortable. Because suddenly it turns out that this isn’t just the story of Emma and Charlie. It’s something much closer to home.
Because “Drama” doesn’t provide answers. It leaves us with a question: do we really want a peaceful love, or one that shatters something inside us?
Photos: A24 press materials
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