Zendaya and Pattinson carry a flawed but thought-provoking romantic comedy that bites off more than it can chew
There’s a reason Kristoffer Borgli keeps getting handed talented casts and A24 budgets. He’s got an eye for the kind of premise that catches in your brain like a splinter and won’t let go. His latest, The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a Boston couple on the brink of their wedding, is no exception. It’s an uneven, sometimes frustrating film, but it’s rarely dull, and the performances at its center are good enough to paper over a lot of cracks.
The setup is deceptively simple. Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are counting down the days to their wedding when a dinner party game spirals out of control. The game is innocent enough: everyone at the table takes a turn confessing the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie’s answer is cringeworthy, Mike’s is a little alarming, and Rachel’s is frankly pretty weird. Then Emma takes her turn, and the film suddenly shifts gears entirely. Her confession is a genuine jaw-dropper, the sort of narrative grenade that’s rare in studio films and genuinely bold in execution.
It’s a shame that Borgli doesn’t quite know what to do with the fallout. The film raises serious questions about race, gender, and the way we judge the people we love when we learn something unnerving about them. Zendaya, who’s working in a quieter register here than her recent high-wire performances, clearly understands the racial and social dimensions of her character’s situation in ways the script doesn’t always match. She communicates more through stillness and restraint than through dialogue, and watching her navigate the emotional wreckage of Emma’s confession is consistently compelling even when the material lets her down.
Pattinson, meanwhile, is doing what Pattinson does best: playing a man slowly coming undone. As Charlie’s composure cracks and his anxiety takes the wheel, Pattinson gives the film its most kinetic energy. He’s a livewire on screen, equal parts sympathetic and infuriating, which is more or less the right note. Alana Haim rounds out the core cast as Rachel, whose reaction to Emma’s secret tips from righteous to full-on vindictive in ways that are almost darkly funny. Depending on your read, she’s either the movie’s moral compass or its most recognizable villain.
Borgli’s direction is at its best when it’s playing with the architecture of the romantic comedy. He knows the genre’s rhythms well enough to subvert them cleverly. The couple’s meet-cute is warm and recognizable, the kind of thing you’d see in any glossy love story, which is precisely the point. Once Emma’s secret is out, those familiar rhythms start to break apart in interesting ways, and the film becomes something harder and stranger. It doesn’t always land, but the ambition is real.
Where The Drama stumbles is in its reluctance to fully commit to the harder material it’s clearly drawn to. The racial dynamics at play in Emma’s story, a Black woman from Louisiana carrying a secret tied to violence, are rich territory that the film keeps circling but never quite enters. Charlie’s arc, for all of Pattinson’s committed work, doesn’t develop so much as it accelerates, and the ending feels like a landing pad the film wasn’t sure how to reach. Some of those formal touches, the fractured timeline, the layered soundscapes, are initially striking but lose their grip as the story progresses.
Still, The Drama is the kind of film that earns its title. It provokes real conversation and asks genuinely uncomfortable questions about whether love is resilient enough to survive the truth. Its central performances make those questions worth sitting with even when the script can’t quite answer them. It’s not Borgli’s most polished work, but there’s something here worth watching.
Screen Rated 
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