Truth be told, given director Kristoffer Borgli’s artistic rap sheet up until now, my screening of his latest film was designed around the buddy system.
Needless precaution, it turns out. The Drama isn’t quite the dissociative contact high of Borgli’s previous trips. But careful teammate selection remains relevant when planning your own screening for entirely different reasons.
The Drama isn’t a typical rom-com romp through run-of-the-mill relationship, uh, drama. It plays more like a thought experiment built around one relationship fight.
And it’s a fucking doozy.
Two happily almost-married people are enjoying the reliably relaxing process of wedding planning when the maid of questionable honor slips one more item onto the checklist: tell your partner the worst thing you’ve ever done—and, since we’re apparently doing this now, tell the group too.
Yep. Guided by this savant of social engineering standing just to the right of the bride, we discover that a little peer pressure and the serene authority of someone who’s already cleared the marital high jump bar are apparently all it takes to turn a wildly inappropriate and invasive question into a festive group activity.
I think we should all try this at home.
The bride, Emma (Zendaya), reveals something that is, well . . . difficult to describe without ruining the surprise. So consider turning awa—she almost became a mass shooter.
There. Now we’ve all learned something about the value of timeliness in spoiler warnings.
After the big spill, there is of course an abysmally acted diatribe from the inciting maid, some bridal emesis and various other forms of dinner-party collapse. No matter. Borgli may yank us out of the scene before it has to account for however the fuck that evening actually ends, but its effectiveness in setting the stage for everything that follows is impossible to dislodge.
The unraveling of our groom Charlie (Robert Pattinson) proceeds from this knowledge drop in ways that aren’t especially dependent on the salacious deets he’s just been forced to ingest. He starts replaying the relationship under harsher lighting and wondering whether the biggest decision of his life was really as well-researched as he claimed back when he and the almost-Mrs. were doing the fantasy draft for wedding guests.
And because that spiral proves relatively independent of the film’s central conflicto con pistola, The Drama settles, at least provisionally, into more familiar romantic territory. Borgli’s fingerprints remain everywhere—the rapid alternative-reality detours, the tightening screws of the score—but the underlying anxieties aren’t that exotic.
At the heart of it, there’s the suddenly terrifying realization that marriage means choosing one person while knowing you can never possess the complete record. There’s the pre-wedding urge to treat every previously survivable incompatibility as evidence that’s arrived after a verdict has been rendered, which means the verdict itself is somehow necessarily in doubt. And there’s the classic relationship maneuver where asking “Do I actually know this person?” begins to feel, after sufficient sleep deprivation and a reliable inward turn of the inquiry, like you are James McAvoy in Split.
This exact pickle may not appear verbatim in the sickness-and-health spiel, but romantic movies have been mining that quarry since roughly the invention of the Hallmark Channel.
The real déjà vu invoked by the movie, though, isn’t the post-conflict ups and downs so much as the narrative’s route through them. Having forced some pretty heavy subject matter out of our Ouija board, Borgli chooses, at nearly every turn as the film approaches its climax, to lighten the mood instead of leaning into it.
Probably not insane play-calling given how tense watching the movie has become by then.
But with that retreat from tension comes a concomitant retreat from any attempt to answer the questions that made it interesting in the first place. How much of another person are you entitled to know before marrying them? Does something terrible in somebody’s past remain relevant if the person standing in front of you is no longer the person who did it? And, once doubt enters the room, is examining it obsessively really an act of wisdom—or just another way to destroy something you were previously happy inside?
The Drama is remarkably good at introducing those questions into our ecosystem like they're a pair of pliers here to remove our fingernails.
Then, just when you expect it to distill all of that viewing discomfort into something transformative, it decides everybody could probably use a little less drama.
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