The Drama review: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are wickedly funny

The Drama (15, 106 mins)

By Brian Viner

Rating:

A floppy-haired, bespectacled Englishman called Charlie, charming and dishy if a bit wet, pretends to be familiar with the novel that a beautiful young American woman called Emma is reading in a Massachusetts café. 

It’s a chat-up manoeuvre that would work better if he weren’t so jolly awkward, and if she weren’t deaf in one ear. Yet soon they are dating, then living together, then writing their respective wedding speeches.

It could be the entire synopsis of a 1990s Richard Curtis romcom; with Hugh Grant, of course, as the bumbling Brit. But from the start of The Drama there are clues, not least in the title, that the course of true love will run anything but smooth.

The writer-director is Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian whose excellent Sick Of Myself (2022) was a pitch-black comedy. And one of the producers is Ari Aster, another specialist in dark comedy, not to mention horror.

Moreover, Charlie is played by Robert Pattinson, who was trapped in a deeply dysfunctional relationship in his last film, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025), and is at his considerable best when his characters have something to brood over, which Charlie certainly does here.

In the week leading up to the wedding, Charlie and Emma (Zendaya, also terrific) have dinner with their best friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), at which all four, fuelled by wine, unwisely cough up to the worst thing they have ever done.

Now, I must try to avoid spoilers, but Emma’s confession concerns a particularly American abomination, something that routinely undermines the claim they like to make to be the greatest nation on Earth. 

It is especially shocking to Rachel, although her self-righteousness is more than a little hypocritical. I can only speak for myself, but her own ‘worst thing’ troubled me more.

Whatever, Charlie is tormented almost to breaking point by the revelation that Emma’s back story, seen sporadically in flashback, contains something so dark. ‘Can we just forget about it?’ she pleads. The person she was back then, she insists, is not the person she is now.

It’s a defence with a powerful modern resonance, for we live in an age in which historical crimes and misdemeanours surface all the time, trashing reputations and imperilling relationships.

Is that always how it should be, or should they occasionally be overlooked – especially if, as in this case, nobody was hurt? The Drama doesn’t hammer the question, but it throbs away throughout.

Charlie does his best to reassure his fiancée that he still loves and cherishes her, but the damage is done. 

He is an art-gallery curator who, at work, obliquely raises Emma’s story with a female colleague, leading to yet further complications. One burst of ill-advised candour and the roof has fallen in.

Was it really ill-advised, though? That’s the other question raised by this naggingly compelling film. 

If you’re about to share your future with someone, and their past contains a secret that might hint at a character flaw, do you have the right to know it?

Either way, we have our own family wedding next month; my daughter’s getting married. Hoping that the reception goes better than Emma and Charlie’s is setting the bar about as low as possible.

Ultimately, Borgli’s film is as deep as we want it to be. Some will see it as an intense psycho-drama, others as a wickedly subversive romcom. It’s both.

It’s also a little heavy-handed at times, and I could have done without repeated vomiting sequences… scarcely a week seems to pass without at least one TV or film character throwing up, almost in competition with each other; as if a new diced-carrots category has been added to the Academy Awards.

But it is smartly written and directed, splendidly acted, and the premise is irresistibly naughty.

By Matthew Bond

Rating:

Ah, beware those late-night games of confession, especially when drink has been taken. That, I think, is the main lesson of The Drama, in which Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play a newly engaged and particularly photogenic Boston couple rapidly heading towards their big day.

Photographers have been booked, flowers chosen, first dances rehearsed. Now it’s just a final choice of menu that brings Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) together with their close friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) to the wedding venue. The hard work has been done – mushroom risotto it is – but the wine is flowing and so is the conversation, when someone asks the fateful question: ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

Uh-oh, I think we can safely say the drama has begun. Because while one confession involves a particularly unchivalrous response to being attacked by an aggressive dog and another an awful tale about locking a small child into a cupboard in a long-abandoned caravan, Emma’s confession is much, much worse.

At least Rachel thinks it is and so do we. Don’t we? You see, Emma only planned to do the very bad thing, she never actually did it. One of the triumphs of Kristoffer Borgli’s clever, complicated and often darkly funny film is that it actually doesn’t deal in moral absolutes, it just pretends to.

An even bigger success for the Norwegian-born film-maker is the quality of the acting. Zendaya is pitch-perfect as Emma, who can be charm personified when she’s in the right mood but has a steely determination underneath.

Pattinson, by contrast (and all the better for finally being touched by just a little age), does a wonderful job of portraying a man trapped in a maelstrom of confusion. Has he met the love of his life or a monster?

The answer eventually turns out to be even more complicated than that, with a late and rather contrived-feeling twist that has already sent the internet into box-office enhancing meltdown, ensuring you’ll certainly have no shortage of things to talk about on the way home.

And one last thing: do look out for Haim, who steals every scene she is in and makes this biting satire of the American Dream one of the must-sees of the spring, except possibly for any couple currently planning a summer wedding themselves…