Zendaya and Robert Pattinson Are All About ‘The Drama’ in Absurdist Dark Comedy

Alci Rengifo

Kristoffer Borgli is the latest millennial filmmaker attempting to diagnose the ills of our times. The Norwegian director tends to be obsessed with our collective obsession with fame, in an era where social media has convinced everyone they deserve to be known. His latest, “The Drama,” detours into more intimate issues as a romantic comedy that also wants to double as broader social commentary. It rises and falls on the performances of its star leads, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, who bring chemistry and sincerity to material that tends to zig-zag all over the place. These two are so strong they make us admire their craft while disliking the characters or inspiring eye rolls at first world problems. Spoiler alert before jumping into the plot if you absolutely do not want to know what exactly causes all the drama of the title.

Zendaya and Pattinson look great together as Emma and Charlie, a couple in their 30s preparing to tie the knot. They are a portrait of what students with debt aspire to with their great jobs and classy, book-filled apartment. She is an editor at some kind of publishing house and he’s a museum curator. As Charlie practices his wedding speech with best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie), we get a breezy flashback to how he first met Emma while basically spying on her as she read a novel, “The Damage,” at a coffee shop. From there, everything just went as it’s supposed to in a love story. Then, while testing the wedding menu with Mike and Mike’s wife, Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim), a game is proposed where they all reveal the worst thing they have ever done. A tipsy Emma confesses she planned a school shooting when she was 15. Rachel is incensed since her cousin was paralyzed in a mass shooting. Charlie shows support but begins to spiral into confusion and uncertainty about how to deal with this information.

Inevitably, Borgli was going to make his way to somehow touch on the mass shooter phenomenon. His darkly comic 2022 film “Sick of Myself” followed the ill-conceived antics of a Norwegian woman wrecked by jealousy over her artist boyfriend’s success, going to extreme lengths with dangerous medication to grab attention. He then made “Dream Scenario,” an engrossingly surreal fable with Nicolas Cage as a bitter academic who suddenly finds mass fame after randomly appearing in people’s dreams. Like Brady Corbet, Borgli is an artist entering his 40s wanting to make some sense of who we are right now. As an absurdist bit of comedy, the inciting incident of “The Drama” is initially effective, particularly in how it derails the whole sunny opening of the film. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan shoots the early moments with the bright richness of a feel good rom-com. The mood then gets choppier as Borgli balances comedy and disturbed awkwardness.

We have seen Zendaya and Pattinson in challenging roles before that required even more physical effort. The former returns for a third season of “Euphoria” in a few weeks. Yet, what they do here is no laughing matter. Because the screenplay keeps most of the tension at surface level, they need to fill in the rest evoking vulnerability and stress. Pattinson becomes almost too much of the focus. Charlie’s downward spiral boils down to being freaked out over now imagining Emma as a teen planning mass murder. There was some dishonesty at play as well because she is deaf in one ear and always claimed it was a condition from birth. In her confessional, Emma admits she lost hearing in that ear from testing her father’s rifle for her scheme.  Pattinson taps into his capacity for morbid humor by having nervous breakdowns, tossing away mugs with gun jokes, and nearly twitching while the wedding photographer uses expressions like, “first I’ll shoot your family.” Zendaya never has to push as far because she’s playing someone now entrapped by having opened her mouth. She plays the fear of now standing naked before her friends and fiancé with an almost heartbreaking subtlety. Alana Haim again proves how good she is by playing the unbending type with the ability to blow any situation out of proportion. We can imagine everyone walking on eggshells around this person.

These excellent performances keep “The Drama” afloat when the material feels like Borgli losing focus of what exactly he wants to say. Is he condemning the self-righteous attitude of being unforgiving for specific discretions in someone’s life? Emma’s brief flirtation with carrying out a mass shooting occurred when she was 15. Not only did she not go through with it, but an actual mass shooting pushed her into then joining anti-gun marches. Is it right for her friends to then call her a hypocrite at 30 for what happened in high school? Charlie mumbles an intriguing point about how gun violence is so common in America, that it shouldn’t be surprising that many people end up fantasizing about it when enraged. Emma was picked on at school, not in any particularly savage way, but with the typical taunts we endure as teens. What Borgli wants to say here is unclear as well. Any chance at real emotional resonance gets harder to achieve because Charlie becomes rather pitiful. Instead of having him truly, deeply grapple with his devotion to Emma, or why it even exists, he is mostly reduced to panic attacks whenever he sees any image of a weapon. Random hallucinations enter his mind of Emma posing with a rifle in bed or bloodied nightmares of all the wedding guests gunned down. Of course, Emma at 15 was clearly having mental health issues and adolescence can have its frightening side effects. It begs the question, then, if we’re supposed to dislike everyone judging her. At a time when genocide is live streamed and we’re going into another senseless war, does it make sense to condemn someone for stupid decisions from adolescence they thankfully walked away from? 

Borgli could have pushed further with the material and turn it into real, edgy satire. He instead settles for some more standard gags as the wedding approaches. It’s rather disappointing when Charlie comes on to a colleague during a breakdown, because that’s what tends to happen in these stories. Now he too has a dark secret in the closet, and one that hits very close to home. Through most of the film we also get to know little about Emma. Maybe Borgli wants to jab at the vapidity of our privileged society, where we can afford to make a scandal over anything. When “The Drama” strikes those notes it does work. Plenty of the jokes do also land, especially at the eventual wedding reception which can get gloriously cringe. The pieces are eventually held together by Zendaya and Pattinson, who together say what the script might struggle to get across. They are indeed a believable portrait of their contemporaries, trying to get by in a world of absolutes, where certain buzzwords can get you into trouble and some confessions can provoke the loss of friends. Maybe love can still endure through it all, but not without emerging bloodied and bruised.

“The Drama” releases April 3 in theaters nationwide.