There’s a moment early in The Drama where everything still feels deceptively perfect. The lighting is soft, the chemistry is effortless, and Zendaya and Robert Pattinson move through their relationship with the kind of easy, enviable rhythm that makes strangers roll their eyes and secretly take notes. It’s a rom-com fantasy – polished, aspirational, and just a little smug.
And then Kristoffer Borgli detonates it.
What begins as a glossy love story – a meet-cute in a café, wedding plans ticking along nicely – mutates, almost imperceptibly at first, into something far more unnerving. Borgli has made a career out of poking at the fragile egos and moral blind spots of modern life (see Dream Scenario), but The Drama feels like his most audacious balancing act yet: a film that is at once deeply uncomfortable, laugh-out-loud funny, and disarmingly romantic.
The premise is deceptively simple. A pre-wedding dinner. Too much wine. A game of confessions that should never, ever have been played. What spills out isn’t just a secret – it’s a psychological hand grenade, one that tears through Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie’s (Pattinson) relationship and leaves everyone in its blast radius scrambling to recalibrate their sense of who she is, and what love actually means when confronted with something you can’t unknow.
From there, Borgli leans into the chaos. Not in a showy, twist-for-twist’s-sake way – but in a slow, queasy unraveling of perception. The film becomes less about the “reveal” (which, yes, is as provocative as you have potentially heard) and more about the ripple effect: the way people perform morality, the speed at which judgment calcifies, and how quickly intimacy can curdle into suspicion.
Pattinson, who has carved out a fascinating post-Twilight career playing men on the verge of emotional collapse, is exceptional here. His Charlie is a bundle of nerves and repression – achingly polite, pathologically avoidant, and utterly unequipped to process what he’s just learned. Watching him try (and fail) to intellectualise his way through a fundamentally emotional crisis is both excruciating and hilarious.
Zendaya, meanwhile, brings a quiet, watchful complexity to Emma. There’s a stillness to her performance that becomes more intriguing as the film unfolds – she never overplays the shock value of the character’s past, instead grounding it in something disarmingly human. If anything, she’s the most composed person in the room, which only makes everyone else’s spiralling reactions feel more revealing.
And then there’s Alana Haim, who nearly steals the film outright as Rachel, a self-appointed moral authority whose outrage says far more about her than it does about Emma. It’s a razor-sharp, darkly comic performance – equal parts hilarious and horrifying in its blind certainty.
What The Drama does so well is refuse to settle. It doesn’t hand you easy answers or moral clarity. Instead, it traps its characters – and by extension, the audience – in a space where discomfort is the point. Borgli skewers everything from performative allyship to the voyeuristic nature of outrage, all while maintaining a tone that teeters precariously between satire and sincerity.
Stylistically, it’s just as assured. The sound design is striking – sharp, invasive, almost conspiratorial at times – pulling you deeper into Charlie’s increasingly fractured headspace. The editing keeps things taut, never letting the tension fully dissipate, while the visual language subtly shifts as the relationship itself begins to warp.
And yet, for all its provocation, the film isn’t cynical. Beneath the awkward silences, the second-hand embarrassment, and the moments that make you want to crawl out of your own skin, there’s a surprising tenderness. A sense that love – real love – isn’t about perfection or even full understanding, but about what happens when the illusion shatters and something more complicated takes its place.
By the time The Drama reaches its final moments – unexpectedly romantic, disarmingly sincere – you realise Borgli has pulled off something quietly remarkable. He’s made a film that thrives on discomfort without being defined by it. One that invites outrage but rewards introspection. It’s provocative, yes. Potentially confronting, absolutely. But above all, it’s thrillingly alive – messy, funny, unsettling, and just a little bit dangerous.
Exactly the kind of drama worth having.
FOUR AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Drama is now screening in Australian theatres.
