Director: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamoudou Athie, Hailey Gates
Certificate: 12A
Run Time: 105 mins

The Drama is a romantic comedy drama about an engaged couple whose relationship is seriously tested in the run-up to their wedding. It’s written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, who made the interesting but flawed Dream Scenario with Nicolas Cage a couple of years ago. Like that film, The Drama is also produced by Ari Aster, the mastermind behind Hereditary, Beau is Afraid and Eddington. Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play the couple in question, Charlie and Emma. Charlie is an Englishman and museum director, while Emma is a sales assistant at a book shop, and the film opens on an awkward scene of how they first met. Fast forward two years later, and the (rather flawed) couple are to be married within a week. While they’re at a wedding rehearsal sampling the menu (and wine!) with two friends, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), Rachel has the brilliant idea of everyone revealing to each other the worst thing they have ever done. When Rachel’s revelation shocks everyone at the dinner table, the couple’s relationship gets seriously tested as they realise they might not know each other as well as they thought they did with the approaching wedding.

While The Drama will certainly have you squirming in your seat and invokes a response that stirs debate, I can’t say that makes it a good film. While both Pattinson and Zendaya are game as Charlie and Emma, their relationship feels very artificial (which I understand is the point) and the people they surround themselves around are similarly shallow. Borgli never quite delves deep enough into any of the character’s inner psyches, or tries to connect their past and present selves, and I never cared for the characters as a result – although this is compounded by how hopeless at life he portrays them as in the film’s opening scene. It also doesn’t help that the attempts at humour fail to land, nor does Daniel Pemberton’s on-the-nose score.

Apart from dealing with some uncomfortable subject matter, Ari Aster’s influence doesn’t really make itself apparent either. The Drama just highlights the different wavelengths Borgli and Aster operate on – the central relationship between Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor in Midsommar has far more thematic depth within the broader horror scope of that film than anything here. While The Drama is undeniably thought-provoking, Borgli’s film is undercooked and its themes never quite coalesce.