RIOTUS

I can tell you everything about The Drama without spoiling anything about The Drama. Let’s start with the question these characters should ask themselves: Is it me? Am I the drama? 

The answer is yes.

That is the struggle for Emma (Zendaya), Charlie (Robert Pattinson), Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Rachel (Alana Haim) when they make the eye-poppingly misguided decision to share the worst things they’ve ever done—just one week before Emma and Charlie’s wedding. And things get dark. That’s The Drama. We start with a meet-cute, high on breezy humor, worthy of a rom-com. We get the backstory through conversations with the couple and their friends. There’s vow writing and reminiscing. It’s all so sweet. Then we careen into a psychological dilemma equal to the trolley problem, but far more real.

I’m not kidding. Similar to his 2023 film, Dream Scenario, writer/director Kristoffer Borgli sets us up with a shocking revelation, pushing us to wrestle with a new kind of worst-case scenario. This is where I would usually tell you what that is, but not this time. The shock of Emma’s confession is a big part of the process of experiencing The Drama. If you already know how you feel about her past going in, you’ll lose the real-time experience of facing your feelings while witnessing Emma, Charlie, Mike, and Rachel’s reactions. The struggle with your own sense of ethics and emotional turmoil is the point. That’s why this is not an easy movie.

Thematically, like in Dream Scenario, Borgli questions whether the perception of guilt is as bad as being guilty. But this time, he spins the blame on his characters, allowing them to devolve to see who ends up splattered and who falls apart. In that way, this thought experiment—trolley problem—kind of film is highly effective but emotionally challenging.

The cast elevates the watchability while deepening the challenge. Both Emmas, Zendaya and her younger counterpart Jordyn Curet, are mercurial, fragile, and tinted with rage. That cacophony of traits makes their descent and recovery tangible and tangled. Pattinson’s Charlie is absolutely pathological and often pathetic, and yet in some ways you’ll sympathize with his attempts to reconcile his love with his fears. Less sympathetic is how easily he lashes out at others, especially women, when he becomes determined to “protect” Emma or ease his emotional ineptitude. Athie’s Mike and Haim’s Rachel are spectacular in that you want to smack them into silence throughout The Drama. 

In a small role as the wedding photographer, Zoë Winters is just as good as she was in The Materialists, and Hailey Benton Gates adds dimension to the story as Misha.

Borgli makes great use of visual storytelling. Charlie’s intrusive thoughts are stunning and disturbing as he plays out various bloody scenarios in his head. But those thoughts also find poetic outlets, like when he feels stuck with Young Emma’s truth rather than the one he fell in love with. Older Emma is replaced by the younger one, and Charlie miserably drags himself through a date night. The visuals are as good as the cast, and so are the nearly haunting audio cues.

In her book All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Alongside the question “Am I the drama?” this movie is about healing and belonging in the face of fixation and recriminations. Second chances matter here, but they’re hard won. The Drama isn’t an easy film; its finish is too much like sandpaper to love, but it’s a well-made argument with faceted sides.