Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | April 3, 2026
You know that thing where it’s perfectly fine for you to complain about someone you’re close to, say your mother or your partner, to a friend, but then if your friend responds by agreeing a little too forcefully—“Oh yeah your mom is a real creep!”—it immediately stops being perfectly fine? And you turn defensive? There’s a lot of that feeling going around in Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s film The Drama, which stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a couple about to get married who find their relationship standing upon a sudden self-inflicted precipice of chaos. In its telling of their unravel, Borgli reaches too hard to write checks about Modern Day America that he can’t quite cash.
It’s not that we don’t get it. America in 2026? Not the greatest! But being inside the belly of this roiling beast, we at least know what’s wrong—we feel it in our bones. Every. Exhausting. Day. The Drama though, for all of the “hot topics” it stabs at in its bleak black comedy flailings, can’t seem to pin down its diagnosis. It’s screaming “This soup is cold!” when it’s been served a hamburger. The satire is incoherent where it should be sharp, and Borgli betrays some too too fundamental fundamentals about our national issues for much of his anything to stick. Much less slice.
All this in a starry wedding dramedy, huh? At least The Drama reaches, I’ll give it that. You wouldn’t know it from the advertising though, which plays coy with what it is that sends its beautiful bride and groom-to-be Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) off on their long day’s journey into hellish night. Not so here though, because I have absolutely no desire to write about this movie without talking about what this movie’s really about. Yes, that’s your spoiler warning. Here’s one more for extra oomph: Spoilers ahead! Thar be spoilers in thar them hills! Et cetera. You have been warned.
So it’s the week of Emma and Charlie’s nuptials and they’re doing all the nuptial things that need to get nuptial-ized. And in between the bites of cake and banters with D.J.s we watch Charlie work on his big reception speech with his best friend slash Best Man Mike (Mamoudou Athie), a structure that grants us a bevy of flashbacks to the couple’s Meet Cute (which involved a misunderstanding involving Emma’s being deaf in one ear) and several notable romantic highlights thereafter. They seem so cute and happy!
Are there red flags planted already? Seeing as how Charlie kinda sorta stalked Emma and lied his way into her life, sure. But none of that’s much beyond the typical machinations of such things—there’s always a little lying early on under the umbrella of “presenting one’s best self.” It’s what we do with the cracks when they inevitably start to show that really tests a couple’s long-term mettle.
Those red flags become fiery red flares shot into the skies however when Charlie, Emma, Mike and Mike’s girlfriend Rachel (Alana Haim, savagely funny in a semi-inexplicable role) get a little too tipsy while testing out wines a few nights before the ceremony. Rachel, who’s also Emma’s best friend and Maid of Honor, instigates a game—going around the table each one will admit the “worst thing they’ve ever done” in their life. Which should be fine, right? They all know and love each other, and are primed to have a friendly laugh at each other’s little foibles. What could possibly go wrong?
Cue the record scratch as all eyes fall last on Emma and she admits (and hey remember you have been warned about spoilers, there’s no going back after this) that back when she was in high school, after a barrage of bullying, she came thiiiiiis close to carrying out a mass shooting. She had her father’s rifle ready, she had filmed her manifesto video—indeed her massacre would’ve been one and done if not for a couple of missteps (including her blowing out her own ear-drum) along the way, all of which ultimately put the kibosh on any kill-fest.
Nothing more American than that! Well Emma’s friends and (British, it should be noted) fiancé don’t so much see it that way, with each of them spiraling out from that revelation in their own ways. None so immediate as Rachel, whose beloved cousin (Anna Baryshnikov, that rascally scene-stealer in Love Lies Bleeding) is in a wheelchair because of a mass shooting. Rachel’s feelings toward Emma turn venomous on the spot, while Mike plays mediator and quickly squirrels them off stage left. That leaves the moments-ago happy-couple behind to piece together the WTF of where they now stand.
And that’s basically the rest of the movie, which more or less abandons the stunned Emma after her confession, running off alongside Charlie’s sometimes-funny mostly-chaotic descent into the darkness of his and his bride’s black souls. It’s about here that we realize that we’ve really been seeing Emma through his eyes this whole time, though—the memories of their Meet Cute were through his telling, and Emma’s been kind of a cipher. An assemblage of his affections, Frankensteined together—she just had the nerve to go yanking on one of those threads, spilling her unpretty guts everywhere.
Thing is, beyond the limpness of The Drama being at heart a fairly time-worn story of a man discovering his perfect woman isn’t so perfect (even when she’s, you know, f’ing ZENDAYA) just as they’re about to be joined for life, it’s simply hard to buy the way these characters behave here among the fallout. Perhaps it’s my own perspective, having been a closeted kid who had zero friends and was mercilessly bullied at school for not just being gay but also being poor and shy and weird to boot, but simply fantasizing about killing your classmates in the heat of those moments does not strike me as wildly outlandish?
It obviously is not healthy! But it is a natural human reaction, a triggered survival instinct among those who’ve been trampled upon for too long. And that’s something which The Drama and the characters within it weirdly have next to no dialogue about. And that strikes me, after decades of national conversations about the effects of bullying, especially within the generation at the heart of this story, as flatly inaccurate mishegoss. The point remains that Emma didn’t actually shoot anybody—her “worst thing” remained a mind-crime.
Zendaya does what she can in projecting Emma’s confusion and hurt (she is very good here) but it’s mostly watched from a distance—I do think the movie is straining to be on her side (Haim’s character is comically unflattering) but simply casting the inherently likeable Zendaya in the role isn’t enough. Perhaps if The Drama had been a whiff more interested in her perspective, as a woman of color drawn into the power fantasies of an horrific American legacy that’s very much always been the playground of white men, something substantive might’ve walked out of the fog of its provocations. But Borgli doesn’t seem super interested in the most interesting thing about his story—he mostly wants to have a bewildered Robert Pattinson running around in an ever-widening state of panic, having failed sex with a co-worker and shoving a woman in a wheelchair around as it all builds to a wedding ceremony of darkly comic mishaps involving head-butts and a whole lotta barf.
And I guess that’s fine! Robert Pattinson is very good at finding funny fresh ways of being a panicked little shit. It just feels lazy and reductive, an easy off-ramp away from the pricklier conversations the film could be having. That it’s already poked at. And worse, it feels dishonest about the American heart it’s attempting to dissect—the distance from which Borgli is wielding his scalpel is barely glancing our flesh. The Drama stuffs a whole lot of big topics into its mouth but, finding itself unable to speak about any of them, opts for a pratfall onto a whoopie cushion instead. And pfffffft goes its weasels.
