Movie Review: The Drama
Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars
The Drama’s strongest and weakest aspects are derived from its central premise. The hook is a strong ‘what if’ scenario that is a fun discussion-topic fodder for us psychoanalyzers of the world. If you’ve ever heard anyone talk about contestants on The Bachelor or Love Island, we’re privy to the sharply edited decisions of reality television characters. “I can’t believe Jenna said this, Michael did that. So on and so forth.
The Drama provides professional actors, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya (the film would be a hard sell without them), and puts them in a higher concept reality-TV scenario. The film’s weakness is that the characters feel more like archetypes than real people. There’s an immersive level that The Drama never breaks through.
Charlie and Emma (Pattinson and Zendaya, respectively) are getting married in a week. They’re comfortably in love, maybe? They seem nice at first. The personality cracks show in minor forms. Charlie fixates on Emma’s determinations. Emma has her outbursts. Nothing egregious at first.
The movie’s capital ‘M’ Moment occurs when Charlie and Emma are having a wine tasting with their best man and woman, Mike and Rachel. A trivial but tricky question is asked: “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
It’s a curious social experiment. Most likely you’re going to pick some teenage act of rebellion that’s an awful thing to do, but you were an idiot kid, so it’s forgivable, right? You’re also deciding the worst thing you’ve done, so there’s some agency in the moment you pick. You’re never going to freely admit if you murdered someone or are a child predator, things of that nature.
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Emma drunkenly admits a dark moment of her past that Charlie, Mike, and especially Rachel see as threatening. Rachel has a personal connection and becomes enraged, putting Charlie in an awkward position of trying to mediate.
As established, Charlie is an overthinker, so writer and director Kristoffer Borgli spends most of the runtime exploring Charlie’s mania coming to grips with Emma’s confession. Emma’s backstory is conveyed through a series of flashbacks to her teenage self. Borgli integrates surrealist imagery to add some unspoken dialogue about what Charlie is thinking.
The Drama reminded me of Heathers in a roundabout way. The plots are significantly different, but the semi-surrealistic exploration of interpersonal judgments has some poignant thematic similarities in its assessment of societal norms.
If that doesn’t work for you, they’re both dark comedies.
I’m not sure what the takeaway from The Drama is meant to be. Is this prominently about THE ISSUE and America’s cyclical nature of arguing around the point until we end up right back where we started? Or is this a foray into fractured relationships where trustworthiness only extends as far as we allow ourselves to see?
I don’t know. I’ll give The Drama credit for stimulating my cerebral cortex and getting conversations whirling in my usually thoughtless brain (kidding, my brain is often reciting 2000s football statistics in case I need to impress my friends with how many touchdowns LaDanian Tomlinson scored in 2006).
I like the ending. It may be seen as an anticlimax, but it’s endearing. Considering the events leading up to it, I did not expect the final scene to play out as it did.
Daniel Pemberton continues to cement his case as a busy composer on the rise in the public consciousness. His musical score for The Drama plays well during eerie scenes. Sound design was also a plus, preying upon Charlie’s fears throughout.
Unfortunately, I struggle to meet the script where it’s at. There’s a lacking relatability for Charlie and Emma that never makes the characters feel grounded in our reality. The word I kept coming back to is “vague”. I can get behind a film for allowing its viewer to determine what the canvas means, but sometimes a nice painting just looks like a nice painting.
