The Drama: a slyly funny psychological drama in a neat rom-com disguise

An arresting moral debate cunningly disguised as a rom-com, Kristoffer Borgli’s unsettlingly cringe film opens with the quirkiest of meet-cutes, as Robert Pattinson’s awkward museum curator Charlie fumbles a pick-up at a Boston coffee shop, not realising that editor Emma (Zendaya) is partially deaf. Her kind offer of a do-over leads to the kind of perfect partnership that is soon blissfully deep in upmarket wedding prep. 

But Borgli, a provocateur whose absurdist black comedies have displayed an obsession with public shaming, abruptly sideswipes the happy couple. A jaw-dropping confession collapses their idyll, when a drunken Emma fatally misjudges a ‘Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done’ challenge at dinner with best man Mike and maid-of-honour Rachel. Her revelation, which involves a story from her teenage years, stuns the film’s audience as much as it does the diners. It also deftly genre-switches the film, from glossy romance to a darkly comic psychological drama, as Charlie grapples with this disturbing new truth about Emma. 

Without being coy, for the film to retain its sudden impact it’s important not to share Emma’s secret here. Let’s just say that it’s a controversial hot-button US issue that few mainstream movies would touch, let alone wrap into a romance. Being in an unsuspecting audience when the narrative lobs it at you provides the rare experience of a communal double-take followed by a variety of reactions from outrage to nervous laughter. 

Borgli, a Norwegian, has an outsider’s curiosity about the American taboo on discussing this most emotive subject. He also has form with edgy dramas (attention-economy narcissism in Sick of Myself (2022), cancel-culture in 2023’s Dream Scenario), but treads nimbly here, careful to satirise the culture’s appalled-yet-tight-lipped attitude to the subject, rather than the horror itself. 

That said, it’s a discomfiting as well as slyly funny film to watch, not least because it revels in Charlie’s spiralling misery, since he’s both fearful and unwillingly fascinated by Emma’s secret past. His mental unfurling is signalled in Borgli’s slippery direction, a welter of sudden jumpcuts to Charlie’s disconcerting fantasies or questioning flashbacks (was Emma’s recent anger at a dangerous driver courageous or a red flag?) which slide disconcertingly around scenes, all presented in the same realistic visual style as the main plot. This choppiness heightens the tension, but Borgli (who is also writer and co-editor here) trusts us to follow it as an externalised account of Charlie’s roiling mind – or occasionally Emma’s paranoia – amplified by Daniel Pemberton’s uneasily spare, flute-and-cello soundtrack. It gives a daring mix of tone and tempo, making you question both your laughs and your gasps. 

As Emma proffers the reasons for her toxic teen choices, the film explores but doesn’t excuse her behaviour. It doesn’t swerve queasily funny slivers of her upsetting teen activities either, played doggedly by Jordyn Curet as Young Emma. Zendaya’s essential sweetness in the role keeps Charlie’s dilemma alive – can he forgive this most unlikely of monsters? But the film oddly completely ignores questions of race, and how its tropes would inflect both nervy Charlie and newly-vindictive maid-of-honour Rachel (a gloriously snarky Alana Haim) in their views of Emma’s transgression. 

However, trapping the rapidly unravelling Charlie in a succession of ghastly pre-wedding stresses (a tortured photo shoot, an ugly showdown with a drug-addicted wedding DJ, coaxing the self-righteous Rachel and Mike back onside) rapidly places his character rather than Emma’s at the film’s centre. Pattinson, skilled at portraying awkward losers, is marvellous here as a wavering coward who can’t quit Emma or quit blaming her, lurching into cringe-inducing episodes of lying, aggression, rank manipulation and even infidelity, to save face. If Borgli’s comedy is sometimes too broad (a one-note gag repeated ad infinitum at the photographers, vomiting as a tired metaphor for mental purging), the cringe-into-chaos of the wedding itself is a fine addition to the suite of explosive celebrations familiar from Scandi satires like Festen (1998) or Melancholia (2011).  

Committing to realism and relatability for the first time onscreen, Borgli keeps things accessible enough for us to wonder repeatedly what we’d do in Charlie’s place. Whether you view this as a regrettable softening on his part or an intriguing development will depend on your preference for Dream Scenario surrealism or the wide-appeal controversy explored here. This is a film with no right answers, whose defiant curiosity about morality and forgiveness seems fated to fuel heated arguments far beyond the cinema foyer. 

► The Drama  is in UK cinemas 3 April.