The Drama Review
Edge of your seat levels of uncomfortableness, The Drama will have you rapt from beginning to end.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) seem like the perfect couple. But when they take turns revealing the worst thing they’ve each ever done with some friends, one of their revelations throws the entire wedding week off the rails.
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, The Drama is gorgeous film that feels almost like an old Hugh Grant rom-com; just slightly elevated and stranger. Perhaps that’s just because Pattinson seems intent on looking as much as humanly possible as an early Hugh Grant.
The film has all the early trappings of a good rom-com. The meet cute, the gorgeous couple, a wedding that is shaping up to be absolutely gorgeous. We know how a movie like this might normally go - some drama pops up that threatens to derail the wedding, and the couple eventually get through it with a beautiful final wedding sequence.
While The Drama very loosely adheres to this formula, it’s the nature of its central conflict that is so strange and exciting. A real thinking conundrum, and one that Borgli has fun starting to play with as a central conflict in each of his characters. It’s so complex, that the eventual wedding sequence also doesn’t shy away from the titular drama, and we end up with a movie that feels like an out of control train - a runaway, that keeps picking up speed as it hurtles towards disaster.
Pattinson is wonderful to watch, and Zendaya an able scene partner. Both are perfectly cast in these roles, and it’s fun to see them play such complexity - although there always feels like there is 10% missing in their characters.
Visually, the film is stunning. The grainy cinematography, the set design, the very New Yorkian feel of it all. Couple that with two magnetic leads and a plot that will have you in equal parts rapt in fascination, and furious at the fact that two loves could let such a thing get between them, and you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat right up until the credits roll.
