Films don’t come much more self-consciously provocative than Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama. It’s a cautionary tale about the power of gossip, designed to pique the curiosity of a social mediasphere in thrall to its gorgeous A-list stars. The sheer wattage on display is a bit blinding; putting Robert Pattinson and Zendaya together as upwardly mobile, slightly hipster-coded lovers against a New York City backdrop is inspired bordering on diabolical. When museum director Charlie (Pattinson) chats up bookstore clerk Emma (Zendaya) in a coffee shop—he has to try it a couple of times because she’s deaf in the ear that isn’t crammed up by headphones— it’s the most nuclear-powered meet-cute in recent memory.
Charlie’s a stammering Hugh Grant manqué who knows he’s landed a baddie; Emma’s slightly aggro tendencies belie a tender heart. Or do they? While on a mission to finalize the wedding menu, Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) and her husband/Charlie’s best man, Mike (Mamadou Ethie), propose a risqué bonding exercise; they suggest that each member of the quartet reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. Tipsy on her second class of caterer-subsidized wine, Emma blurts out something so mortifying that you can almost hear the needle scratching against the vinyl of reality. Not only does Emma’s story bring the lunch to a halt, it leaves Charlie—previously seen composing his potential groom’s speech as an encomium to his future wife’s kindness, grace, and sexual athleticism—with the coldest feet in Manhattan. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he grumbles as he leads the staggering, semiconscious Emma up the spiral staircase of their apartment. To sleep, and perchance to dream of anything except his bedmate’s remembrance of things past.
As it’s impossible to discuss The Drama without referring to Emma and Charlie’s own discussion, it’s better to just deal with the Elephant in the room. When Emma was 15, she explains, she planned and armed herself for a school shooting, going so far as to record an explanatory video on her laptop. The only reason she didn’t go through with it in the end was that some other local kid opened fire in a shopping mall first, putting the community on high alert and, it’s implied, stealing her thunder; the deafness in her ear was a result of target practice gone awry.
Borgli, whose previous features Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario were both made in a spirit of sadistic one-upmanship, knows he’s prodding a sensitive area; given his film’s carefully calibrated elements of emotional exploitation and cultural critique, an alternate title could be Trolling for Columbine. The reveal is worthy of the online marketing campaign positioning The Drama as the spring’s art-house conversation piece: This might be the first romantic comedy in history where a school shooting is used to set up a will-they-or-won’t-they. A bigger question is whether a movie structured around scenes of characters trying to talk things out has anything to say about its charged subject matter.
Good satire has no requirement to be tasteful, or palatable. If laughter is indeed the best medicine, it’s because it doesn’t go down easily. Borgli’s reluctance to artificially sweeten his material would be admirable if the admixture were more potent overall. Despite being structured as the narrative equivalent of downward spiral, The Drama doesn’t generate much of an undertow as it goes along; the ethical murkiness coalesces atop shallow waters. Emma’s bombshell and the anxieties it catalyzes in the people around her—not just Charlie but Rachel, whose cousin was partially paralyzed in a mass shooting, and who angrily threatens to boycott the wedding—are vividly acted without being especially plausible; it’s as if the angst has been dropped onto the character’s head instead of bubbling up from within. Zendaya does what she can with the part, which is a lot; oscillating between Sphinx-like impassivity and abject sadness, she shows more range than usual.
Charlie, meanwhile, isn’t even all that vividly acted. While Pattinson is a typically adroit seriocomic performer—willing and able to puncture his own penchant for intensity—his sweaty fulminating here feels distinctly like shtick. It doesn’t help that his performance is consistently punctuated by quasi-Surrealist inserts of massacres and flowers that also feel like shtick. These hallucinatory flourishes never seem to belong to the characters; they’re more transparently Borgli’s bids to place himself on the edgelord-visionary wavelength of Yorgos Lanthimos or Lars von Trier.
Speaking of Lars—who remains the preeminent provoc-auteur of the last 40 years, both for the dexterity of his craft and the clockwork-Kubrickian precision of his sadism—he once scripted a pretty vicious indictment of all-American gun craziness called Dear Wendy (2005). Its tale of disaffected, retro-chic teenagers brazenly brandishing their firearms in the faces of parents and police officers wasn’t subtle, but it was funny (in the most Von Trierish touch, a juvenile delinquent’s favorite book is a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, from which the closing pages have been ripped out). There’s also a wry, malevolent sense of purpose in Toronto director Matt Johnson’s The Dirties (2013) about a high school cinephile who tries to get revenge on the cool kids who mocked his Tarantino-flavored AV-club project by chronicling his plans for a massacre; the mock-documentary style imbues the proceedings with mounting dread.
The Drama gestures at its own sort of social commentary by having Charlie—whether earnestly or in an attempt to save face, or both—propose to Rachel and Mike that Emma’s fleeting moment of psychosis was a by-product of the country she lives in, but the observation rings even hollower than it’s supposed to. The flashback scenes of Emma’s swamp-adjacent adolescence in New Orleans might as well be taking place on another planet, but not in persuasive ways; Borgli doesn’t have the attention span to create a lived-in portrait of exurban teenage alienation. Instead, we get swift, loaded little snippets—a lonely bedroom, a hint of racialized bullying, parents as a noticeable structuring absence—that could be unreliable memories or the work of a filmmaker leaning on shorthand. The same goes for the young Emma’s shift to gun control activism as an attempt to exorcise her demons, and also her stated curiosity about the “aesthetics” of gun violence. The latter serves largely as an excuse for shots of Zendaya posed curled half-naked in bed around an assault rifle. This is not a real moment in Emma’s life; it’s a vision from the depths of Charlie’s anxious, though still horny, subconscious.
Borgli likes to have his fetishism and skewer it too. At one point, Charlie flips through a gallery catalog of chicks-with-guns portraits pointedly titled Brainrot, as if placing the film’s not-so-hidden theme in plain sight. The point of such semiotic gamesmanship is to make the filmmaker look like he’s being smart about some larger, ambient stupidity; to suggest that The Drama’s own taboo tableaux are suitable for framing. Like his producer Ari Aster, whose Eddington similarly cultivated a brainrot, Borgli splits the difference between pandering and pondering, which doesn’t quite add up to anything like analysis.
There was a smart idea at the center of Dream Scenario, which drew on Nicolas Cage’s recognizability in its fable about a man dealing unexpectedly with the perils of overnight overexposure. That film’s theme of cancellation surely bleeds into The Drama, which is pressurized by Emma’s fear that people—including Charlie—are talking behind her back. Both plotlines appear more personal in light of Borgli’s own confessional essay about having dated a 16-year-old when he was in his late twenties. The essay, titled “May-December,” was originally written in 2012 for the Norwegian magazine D2 but resurfaced on Reddit a week before The Drama’s release date. Like Emma, Borgli has a deeply off-putting backstory, one that he is nonetheless moved to share, to present to the public less in a spirit of confession than confrontation.
The reaction to Borgli’s piece, which is adorned with unapologetic age-gap anecdotes (“She never laughed at my Seinfeld references,” he recalls of his 16-year-old inamorata) and shout-outs to Woody Allen, has threatened to surpass his film’s carefully prepared surprises. The sentiments of “May-December” manifest in The Drama at a molecular level in the supremely queasy sequence where Charlie, crashing out hard in the wake of Emma’s story, has visions of himself canoodling with her sullen 14-year-old incarnation (Jordyn Curet)—a sight gag that sticks in the collective craw.
Borgli is eager to offend: He gives off all the signals of an outsider artist. But he’s pretty clearly an insider-outsider, one who’s chuffed to be shooting in the fanciest precincts of Manhattan with beautiful movie stars, and putting them through their paces in Von Trier–ish fashion. At one point, Charlie and Emma squirm through a rehearsal with a frustrated wedding photographer who keeps telling them to act more naturally when the joke is that their mutual grimaces are all too authentic.
This timely but amorphous theme of “performativity” is, ostensibly, Borgli’s ace in the hole, or maybe the joker up his sleeve. If his mainstream breakthrough resembles a high-gloss romantic comedy, might it not be—he asks, wryly—in the spirit of subversion; of imitation as the insincerest form of flattery? Maybe, but for all the cringey altercations and painfully bruised facial features (and egos) that serve as The Drama’s collateral damage, it’s weirdly anodyne in the end; wherever it goes, it isn’t the proverbial there that is the destination of filmmakers spelunking for shock value.
No less than marriage, dark comedy requires commitment, but Borgli traffics in opportunism. Charlie and Emma may make it, but this well-upholstered fainting couch of a movie seems unlikely to stand the test of time: It’ll crumple up and blow away before its paper anniversary has come and gone.
