Few movies could more perfectly embody our confused, disordered, and finally inconclusive times than The Drama. Pitched to audiences, in trailers and other publicity, as a darkly comic nightmare vision of matrimony — say, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Generation Z — the movie is actually far more sinister than that. Zendaya stars as bride-to-be Emma, a seemingly perfect ingenue who, among drinks and feckless game-playing, confesses to her betrothed, Charlie (Robert Pattinson), that she once hatched plans for, of all things, a school shooting. This sends the couple’s marital plans into a state of mayhem, the “drama” of the title.
Yet, for writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, this preposterous plot twist has no point beyond its own preposterousness. Borgli does not seem to intend the movie to be a psychological study. Pattinson and Zendaya have been directed far too broadly for their characters to come across as anything but caricatures, the unhappy couple on an SNL skit. The filmmaker does not even spend much time (as we conservative viewers suspect he might) high-handedly inveighing against firearms in American society. At times, Borgli seems to want the movie to be about forgiveness, the intriguing moral question of whether the confession of an imagined but unrealized crime is sufficient to absolve the almost-criminal in question, but he never finds the tone or time to develop the theme thoughtfully. The movie, then, fails as character study, agitprop, or Dostoevskian meditation.
What, then, is the point of The Drama? In fact, the title gives us the biggest clue: it is “drama” for its own sake, sound and fury signifying nothing. It is a repellent film, not for the daring to deal with tough themes. To the contrary, an interesting movie could be made about the film’s unlikely but compelling premise. No, it is nauseating because it puts forward this ghastly scenario simply to induce a reaction in the audience. That several in the multiplex audience I saw the movie with did laugh may be taken as evidence that it succeeds on its terms — or as confirmation that portions of the ticket-buying public are, regrettably, as disordered as the director.
The movie establishes its completely unappealing tone in the opening scene. As Charlie, Pattinson has been directed to behave like a square-jawed, well-coiffed Woody Allen: nerdy, stumbling, ill at ease with members of the opposite sex. Astonishingly, we are meant to believe that he is so nervous about chatting up Emma in a coffee shop that he surreptitiously takes a photo of the book she is reading, quickly looks up its description online, and proceeds to stammer and stutter his way through a conversation with her about the book. It is wonderful for actors to play against type, but no one buys that the former star of the Twilight teen vampire movie franchise would have trouble making conversation with Zendaya.
For about thirty minutes, the movie hovers in a no man’s land of ill-defined intentions. Charlie and Emma, now a couple merrily cohabitating at his apartment, fight over nothing except who gets to tell what story in their wedding reception speeches. To call the movie The Drama is itself a form of needless audience titillation: We wonder all through these prosaic scenes what the drama is and when it will start happening.
The big reveal comes during some sort of food-and-wine tasting event attended by the happy couple and their friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim). Their idle chitchat gets weird when it is proposed that each member of the foursome disclose the thing in their lives of which they are most ashamed. Charlie admits to having been a teenage cyber-bully (yawn). Mike talks about an incident in which he failed to protect his then-girlfriend from an out-of-control canine (more yawn). Rachel, rather more ominously, recalls an incident in which she locked a young child in a closet. Then Emma says the following, the line that is meant to seize the audience mid-popcorn bite: “Oh, I, like, almost did a mass shooting.”
Because the film is so half-heartedly conceived, the revelation that, as a teenager, Emma was sufficiently unhappy to consider committing such a terrible crime makes about as much sense as her saying she had once gone to the moon. It does explain why she is deaf in one ear (she mishandled her father’s rifle while testing it), but Emma has heretofore shown no signs of aggression, instability, or psychosis. After the reveal, we see Emma in flashbacks as a disturbed teen, but even these scenes are played more for unseemly comedy than plausibility. One awful scene has the young Emma using her computer to record a video outlining her motivations for her crime, but she keeps getting interrupted by prompts for software updates. To some, perhaps, this is funny.
No less credible is Charlie’s reaction to his future wife’s disclosure. Most normal fiances might reconsider their pending union, but Charlie, apparently unable to act, limps along with photo sessions, floral planning, and other inane pre-wedding activities. Much of this, too, is played for ill-judged laughs, such as the photographer who keeps referring to “shooting” various family members in portrait sessions. Of course, Charlie is greatly disturbed by Emma’s backstory, but he strains to look past it, internalize it, and reassure himself that she has left her problems in the dust. Because Pattinson is so ludicrously miscast as this indecisive dweeb, we keep wondering why he persists with the engagement since he could almost certainly find another mate whose history does not include premeditating mass murder.
The Drama only comes alive as an intellectual exercise fleetingly, when, amid all the gross-out set pieces (including multiple scenes of Emma throwing up), we stop to consider whether Emma’s revelation truly disqualifies her from getting married — from, in other words, moving on and getting to have a life. We wrestle, during these moments, with our ideas about whether second chances, much-touted in American culture, are actually attainable. (The Haim character quickly and loudly denounces Emma, and seems set up as a cancel culture-type figure, but her character is never fleshed out, either.) But we think these things despite the movie itself, which has no goal but to pummel the audience.
One thing is for sure: Please, no second chances for the people who made this contemptible and comprehensively terrible movie.
Peter Tonguette is the film critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.