Review: Pitch-black romcom ‘The Drama’ leaves you guffawing and gutted
2026 / Dir. Kristoffer Borgli
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: Ruben Östlund movies, an American remake of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration remade into a romcom, finding out horrifying secrets about your loved ones that forever change how you look at them, and reliving the stress of planning your wedding but it’s so much worse this time.
Do you think you know everything about your partner? What if they had a secret so dark that it shattered how you viewed them entirely? That’s the situation Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) find themselves in the week of their wedding in Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black comedic follow-up to Dream Scenario.
We’re first introduced to Emma and Charlie through a clever device: Charlie rehearses his wedding speech with best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie, Kinds of Kindness, Archive 81), which then cuts to key moments in their relationship. Most important is what would be a typical romcom meet-cute, where Charlie pretends to have read the book he sees Emma reading in a coffee shop. Appearing to ignore him, Charlie gives up, tries again, and starts awkwardly ranting before Emma finally turns around. Turns out she’s deaf in one ear and has a hearing aid in the other.
Even though Charlie’s only a little bit more developed than the bland exasperated husband archetype Pattinson played in last year’s Die My Love, Pattinson and Zendaya have loads of chemistry together. They’re both a bit awkward and dorky and genuinely seem made for each other. That is, until a dinner with Mike and his wife, and Emma’s maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), turns into a game of “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?” It’s best if you can avoid finding out what it is, but Emma’s answer from her depressed teenage years is so incredibly dark that it immediately changes what everyone thinks about her. Alana Haim doesn’t have a small part, but her transformation from caring friend to utter revulsion is why she needs to be cast in a lot more movies.
Filtered often, but not exclusively, through Charlie’s perspective, The Drama continually ups the awkward and hilarious cringe comedy while heightening tension and anxiety through a discordant score, a sound mix that echoes the internal paranoia that people are always talking about Emma, and several clever visual devices. The film uses many wipe edits, where the camera pans into another scene that can be a dream, a flashback, anxious thoughts, or sometimes all of the above. For example, Charlie will imagine key moments of their relationship, but with him and the troubled teenage Emma (Jordyn Curet), or horrific visions of what may befall their wedding. These cinematic tricks serve to destabilize Charlie’s reality as he starts second-guessing every aspect of their relationship, and Borgli does the same back to him, making him seem more like a creep as he spirals downward.
The Drama won’t be for everyone, but I found a lot of truth in its exploration of relationships, raising but not answering questions about how we reconcile our past selves in new relationships, how we can make sense of our partners when we can only ever know them as they are now, and the lengths we can go to support our partners. Again, without spoiling anything, Borgli, as a Norwegian who has lived in the United States for many years, rightly and messily digs into how absurd it is even to try having a rational relationship in a country whose culture revolves around constant violence that we pretend isn’t around us.
There are going to be those who wish The Drama plumbs the depths of darkness even further, yet it ultimately cares about its characters too much to cross the line into Ari Aster territory. The wedding scenes could certainly have been weirder or even more chaotic. But overall I found The Drama to be a provocative use of the rom-com format that tries to see how far the genre can be stretched, walking right up to the limit before it breaks. I left the theater surprised that a movie I rarely stopped laughing at had also left me gutted and speechless, prompting me to dissect my own relationships on the long walk to the subway that would take me home.