The show of The Drama started for me, before the film itself began. It was the 7pm screening on a holiday Friday but even still I was surprised by the numbers filing in, the buzz in the air not too dissimilar from that of a wedding congregation taking their seats with an excited expectation. In 2026 this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re about to have a great, life changing cinematic experience but more indicates that the marketing team got the tone of their social media coverage just about right and managed to cut through the haze of content content content and tap in to something incisive enough to get people to leave their houses and cracked firesticks for a couple of hours. This in itself is an achievement.
The premise of The Drama is fairly simple, it’s the week of Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma’s (Zendaya) wedding but through an ill advised game of revelations with their respective best man (Mike – Mamoudou Athie) and maid of honour (Rachel – Alana Haim), a truth surfaces from Emma’s past that throws everything (and everyone) into disarray and sets off a potentially catastrophic chain of events. The next hour is a satire of our social constructs, our own inner dialogues, inter-personal relationships and well, wedding’s. The film may be divisive but it is objectively funny, it just depends on what you’re willing to laugh at.
In Kristoffer Borgli’s last film, Dream Scenario where Nicholas Cage plays a man who starts to appear in the dreams of thousands of strangers, Borgli posed the question ‘how responsible are we for other people’s response to us?’. The Drama asks us similar questions, forcing us to consider our place in the world based not only other people’s perceptions of us but our own relationship with how we feel we are perceived. Throughout the movie we see Robert Pattinson’s ‘Charlie’ wrangle with the idea of being guilty by association, we see him overthink in real time about how he could end up being perceived by his peers and the wider world possibly even before working out how he feels about things. Emma is struck by the revelation that a past she thought she’d left behind and certainly can’t change still has the power to effect her life and relationships in the present and the unfortunate cruelty of that. The film picks at a deep insecurity we all may have, that even the people who love us most could change their mind if they knew ‘the real us’ and even with all the cringe comedy, the second hand embarrassment, the social awkwardness present throughout the movie, it’s actually this core existential angst that provides the most discomfort.
Setting aside the narrative and moral crux of the film, there is still a lot be admired. The performances are mostly flawless (Alana Haim is brilliantly nightmarish in her portrayal of the best friend gone bad) and the slick editing really helps the comedic heartbeat of the film, particularly effective are the cuts back to a bygone internet culture with the execution of this alone enough to generate laughs. The film itself looks beautiful throughout and presents you with a dreamy looking world you’d love to live in, that is until it’s brought crashing down in a nightmarish yet recognisable fashion.
Ultimately, The Drama, lives or dies with its questions and not its answers: the questions it forces you to ask yourself and the ones it poses about we respond to each other as we navigate today’s ever changing moral landscape. But whilst it leaves you to ponder, The Drama will keep you exhilarated, entertained and uneasy in your seat.
