The Drama Review: A Movie That Asks An Impossible Question

The text contains spoilers

There's a very specific kind of movie that doesn't quite wow you, but you can't stop thinking about on the drive home.

The Drama is that movie.

Kristoffer Borgli's dark comedy stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma and Charlie — an engaged couple who look like they walked out of a Nora Ephron fantasy. Great apartment, great careers, great love story. Then, at a drunken dinner with friends, someone suggests the game: what's the worst thing you've ever done? And Emma answers honestly.

The secret she reveals — which involves a school shooting she planned and nearly went through with as a fourteen-year-old — is deliberately provocative, and Borgli knows it. The film is clearly aware of the minefield it's walking through. Whether it navigates it gracefully is a different conversation.

Here's the thing: the school shooting angle is genuinely sensitive territory, and the film doesn't fully earn its right to be there. It's used almost as an allegory — a way of asking how much darkness in another person you can love through. Which is a valid question. But the subject matter is so loaded that it sometimes feels like the film is hiding behind the metaphor instead of actually confronting the thing it brought up. You're left wondering if Borgli really wanted to say something about gun culture and mass violence in America, or if the school shooting was just the most extreme lever he could pull to test the limits of love and commitment. Possibly both. Possibly neither fully?

What the film gets completely right is its two leads. Pattinson's downfall across this movie is, frankly, a joy to watch. His Charlie is the kind of man who has built his entire personality around being composed and cultured, and watching that fall apart in real time is deeply entertaining. The wedding speech scene specifically — the cringe, the unraveling, the sheer car-crash energy of it — is the kind of thing that makes you want to physically leave the room while also being completely unable to look away. He and Zendaya are both great actors of their generation, and their range here is genuinely impressive.

Zendaya, for her part, holds the film together with a quietness that does a lot of heavy lifting. Emma is not written with as much depth as she deserves — the script sometimes forgets to give her enough to do — but Zendaya makes sure you never stop watching her.

The film's biggest question, the one it keeps returning to, is a genuinely good one: how much of your past do you owe your partner? Are some secrets yours to keep? Is loving someone at their worst a romantic ideal or just a thing people say until they're actually tested? The Drama doesn't answer any of this neatly, which is probably its most honest quality.

It's messy and uneven. It bites off more than it chews. But it's also the rare film that makes you leave with an actual question in your head, rather than just a plot summary.

Not a great film. But an interesting one. And sometimes, that's enough.