(Above: Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama (2026), via IMDB).

By M. Faust

On metacritic.com, a site that aggregates reviews from professional critics and assigns them a score on a 100-point scale, reviews of the new film The Drama range from 100 to zero, which is something you don’t see very often. 

My opinion? Somewhere in between those. 

Written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario), The Drama stars Robert Pattison and Zendaya as Charlie and Emma, a Boston couple who meet cute, fall in love and get engaged. Less than a week before the big day, they are having too many drinks at dinner with their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Rachel (Alana Haim) when someone decides that they should all tell each other the worst things they have ever done. 

What Emma reveals from her teenaged past is so shocking that Rachel flips out at her while the men sit silently stunned. With only a few days to go until the wedding, Charlie is left wondering whether he should call it off. 

In real life, a shock like this would lead to lots and lots of talking, about Emma’s situation at the time of her Worst Thing (which in fact she didn’t even do: it was something she planned but decided against at the last minute), about her development since then and her current mindset, and a million other things. 

(Actually, in real life Emma never would have admitted this in the first place, but plots gotta plot.) 

Instead, Charlie reacts like someone in a bad sitcom, shutting Emma out while obsessing about the revelation and letting it affect his life in other ways. In fact, the movie starts taking on the shape of a sitcom, with Charlie’s actions becoming increasingly hysterical. The difference is that in a sitcom we put up with a contrived situation like this because we don’t take it seriously—it’s just an excuse for gags. Borgli clearly devised Emma’s offense to shock audiences, but having done that he fails to treat it with the seriousness it deserves. 

In all honesty, I was never sure whether or not parts of The Drama were supposed to be funny. Certainly the climax of the film plays like comedy, like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David’ behaves abominably for 20 minutes in order to set up a big cathartic laugh. If that was Borgli’s intention, he needs to study a whole lot of film comedies to see how it’s done, because it looks to me like he hadn’t got a clue. 

In fact, I’ll recommend one he can start with: Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006), about a woman who does something inappropriate one night while in college. She immediately regrets it and puts it aside, but a decade later makes the mistake of telling her fiancée about it. It’s essentially the same plot, and a better movie because Goldthwait shows empathy for his characters, something you cannot say of Borgli’s film.