‘The Drama’ movie review: Zendaya and Robert Pattinson glitter and jitter in crackling, edgy romance

Her name is Emma (Zendaya), his name is Charlie (Robert Pattinson), and just like any other couple, the two have their meet-cute moment at a bustling cafe in New York. With a jollier-than-thou first date where emotions are unmasked, an instinctive first kiss post-midnight at the Manhattan museum, and a marriage proposal whispered straight to her damaged ear— their story has the perfect setup for an endearing wedding day speech, just like any other romance-for-the-ages. There is only a wholesome promise in The Drama in the opening portions, until the surface beneath the surface begins to sneak in. It’s not for nothing that the title of the book Emma reads when they first meet is ‘The Damage’ as he pretends to have read it. The metaphors speak for themselves further as an explosive secret from her past blows up during a conversation. The collapse of their intimate dream has parallels with the rapture of the American dream. What’s personal gets messy and political. This is not like any other love story after all.

Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli frames the early moments in his edgy dark comedy with a frantic dissonance, employing sublime jump cuts to move across timelines and bring a sense of jarring unease to the fairytale of Emma and Charlie. The breathless juxtaposition also produces humour that relies as much on the placement of these cuts as it does on the sharpness of the dialogues.

It is only when the secret is revealed that Borgli adds a sense of calm to the writing in what is among the longest scenes in the film, which takes place at a restaurant over a few wine bottles in the presence of Charlie’s friend, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and his partner, Rachel(Alana Haim). The nature of the conversation turns quite smoothly to all of them describing the worst things they have done in life, where a terribly drunk Emma is pressured to share her story from the time when she was fifteen and dreamt of doing a mass shooting in her school. Expectedly, the mood shifts, there is a switch in tone of the characters, and the film has a change of heart.

A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
A24

Borgli is not new to these tonal shifts, having previously made off-beat, absurdist and surreal pieces with Sick of Myself (2022) and Dream Scenario (2024). However, he builds an audacious premise with The Drama. On one side, it mirrors interpersonal concerns of how well you know someone you love and how far will you go on accepting them for what they were. Borgli touches upon these when a devastated Charlie confronts Emma with pointed questions about why she fantasised about guns, what made her not do it and so on. In these portions, the film takes on a documentary-like rigour to understand the psychology of Emma and many like her, who grew up as wounded children in a polarised country. It is all filmed with sensitivity, mingling rather smoothly with the changing dynamics between Emma and Charlie, knowing when to pull back from its ironical overlays and cast an eye of empathy.

There’s still a lot that gets unsaid as Borgli largely uses the political overtures to complicate the tension between the lovers. He choses political awareness over political consciousness, making the entire ordeal feel like just another dimension to Emma’s psyche. It remains an incisive idea that gets lost in the muddle, in what could have attained a similar, pressing bolt as that of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) or even Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. These films flew in through a popular genre with a larger purpose while Borgli uses the political flourishes to take us back to Emma and Charlie.

Which also turns out to be its fitting course. Borgli’s insistence on treating the film as a traditional romance has its powerfully crackling moments, leading to an emotionally affecting climax that beautifully brings in a call-back to an earlier scene, leaving us with an aching resolution. Even through all seriousness, the humour stays intact, lending the film a strange pull of a tragic-comedy. The editing remains inventive, as seen in a transition from a conversation about gun shooting to a chirpy photographer enthusiastically listing all the family members she plans to shoot at the wedding. It is also a scene that is as immaculately performed by Pattinson and Zendaya, as they hide under the pretence of ‘the normal’, but can’t bring themselves to pose as per the instructions given by the photographer.

A still from the film
| Photo Credit:
A24

Pattinson enters Charlie with the charm of a dreamy lover-boy, only to slowly embody his disintegration with a precipitous palpability where his doubts and frustrations are instantly humanised. Zendaya complements his hysterics with a composed reckoning, breaking into a flurry of enigma at times while maintaining a certain mystery in her being otherwise.

It is the remarkable performances between the two actors that add a lot of bite to the story, often creating moments of wondrous romance in a carefully devised dance sequence or the decaying love reflected through conflicted eye glances and dispirited gestures. It is love that brought Emma and Charlie together, and a country’s state of affairs that threatened to make them into strangers. That’s why Emma’s past (and America’s history) couldn’t just remain their ugly secret; it is bound to come out in the open, leave bruises and blood, and continue to shape the future of their present. Can they start over? Certainly, but only when the nation heals its wounding core. Without that, there’s no love in this story; without that, it will forever remain not-like-any-other.

The Drama will be released in theatres on April 3