In her review, Dami Angela Akinniranye explores the moral complexities at the heart of The Drama.
The Drama sustains the kind of uneasy wit that makes laughter catch in the belly. The film was announced through a faux wedding announcement published in The Boston Globe. The A24 production stars heartthrob Robert Pattinson, best known for Twilight and The Batman alongside superstar Zendaya (Dune, Euphoria).
What begins as a light romantic setup of wine, flirtation and wedding planning slowly curdles during a confession over a wedding cake tasting dinner. We dissect, witness, and gape at the rationalisation and complex psyche of Emma Harwood (Zendaya). She drunkenly shares that she stole her father’s rifle in middle school and planned and recorded a manifesto. She reveals that the only reason she never carried out the attack was not a moral objection, but the fact that another attempted shooting happened before she could act.
This understandably receives a shocked response from everyone at the table: her fiancé Charlie Thompson (Pattinson), his best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Mike’s wife and Emma’s maid-of-honour, Rachel (Alana Haim). One would never anticipate the character embodied by such a wholesome ex-Disney star being a school shooter, attempted school shooter, anyway. That is the issue, the drama of it all.
Charlie’s growing discomfort starts at that dinner. It becomes part of the film’s larger focus, examining how people carry around shame, fear, and indecision when confronted with something so grotesque, but also such a frequent occurrence within American culture.
He attempts to reconcile his feelings as the day of the wedding draws near. There is real tension in watching a couple attempt to keep moving forward when the ground beneath them has begun to split open. The outside judgement of his best friend and his wife clashes with his desire to overlook and move forward with her, although he too is scared.
In an interview on the Popcorn podcast, director Kristoffer Borgli admitted he was not aiming to fixate on sociopolitical radicalism, but on personal limits: the private edges of honesty, desire, and moral weakness. Read that way, The Drama is not quite interested in Emma’s confession as a public scandal, but rather as a test of intimacy, a question of how a partner responds when the person they love reveals something unthinkable.
That framing becomes harder to separate from the director’s own resurfaced essay about dating a 16-year-old when he was 27, in which he references Woody Allen and cited Norwegian age-of-consent laws would have made the relationship legal. His background warps the film’s purpose and effect: what potentially could have been a conversation about accountability, performative judgement, and conditional love begins to feel almost self-protective. Is the film asking the audience where the line is while keeping one foot planted just behind it?
From there, Charlie’s reaction makes perfect sense. Being the slightly bumbling character he is, and under the pressure of the wedding, he does not approach the revelation wisely. Scattered and anxious, he googles psychology questions, latches onto fragments of language, and tries to construct meaning from them. The narrative structure of the film follows his mind as he starts reinterpreting the past.
He recalls many moments that now seem charged. Emma yelling at a driver in the crosswalk. Slapping Charlie in the bedroom. These flashes of aggression now appear much more ominous. Most telling is an awkward lunchroom scene with Charlie’s coworker Misha (Hailey Gates). Charlie begins asking hypothetical questions about having an almost school-shooter partner. Charlie wants to move forward, to preserve the relationship, but his behaviour betrays the fact that he is already re-evaluating Emma through a lens of suspicion. The wedding looms closer, while his certainty dissolves.
Visually, The Drama is superbly shot, with a polished surface that only makes the emotional fallout underneath feel sharper. The ads are handled with particular invention, using this bourgeois couple in an idyllic home to misdirect from the conversation of a generation saturated by violence and forced to process it in high definition.
Emma is the film’s dramatic centre, and Zendaya performs with a controlled, fragile intensity that keeps the film anchored in authenticity, even when the material becomes more unnerving. The fact that Emma is deaf in one ear makes Zendaya's portrayal of a disabled lead important for representation, given her status in the world.
Humour this dark isn't for everyone. The cinema in Rathmines itself seemed hesitant to laugh, which only heightened the tension. Several moments prompted the kind of sidelong glances that suggest the film might be getting couples to question, too, 'what’s the worst thing my partner has done?' Perhaps pushing the room into moral self-recognition?
This theme becomes even more unsettling in light of the aforementioned resurfaced letter. As an audience, we are asked to question where moral boundaries lie, then to wrestle with similar questions through fiction. Yet, now, in the wake of the Epstein files and rising rates of femicide, when the stakes of complicity, concealment, and the aestheticisation of intimacy already feel painfully real, that invitation lands differently.
The Drama remains compelling, but also functions as a kind of moral mirror, one that can be illuminating, but also potentially propagandistic. Rather than simply exploring shame, guilt, and the possibility of redemption, this film risks muddying the question of when, if ever, we should stop condemning the sinner.
This discomfort is one of the film’s greatest achievements.
The Drama is available to stream online now.
