“The Drama” comes at you from a lot of different directions. It’s a thriller, it’s a satire, it’s a cringe dramedy, it’s a slapstick farce. But while it leaves you constantly trying to get your bearings, you almost don’t even notice that you are watching a movie that is a fairly conventional romantic comedy at heart.
There are a lot of ways “The Drama” could have gone wrong, but the biggest reason it stays on the rails starts with its two leads, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, who play Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple days away from their wedding.
The happy couple are having dinner with their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) when a shocking revelation leaves everyone scrambling, and Emma and Charlie reeling to the point that there might not be any wedding at all.
Zendaya and Pattinson know exactly the tone this movie is trying to strike, giving their characters just enough humanity that you can relate to them, and just enough obliviousness so that you don’t mind seeing them get kicked around a little.
Zendaya is great at being perfectly poised even as the cracks reveal that she’s barely keeping it together. Pattinson, who gets to use his actual British accent for a change, is dopey, nervy and insecure to the point that just the word “crisis” might send him into a tailspin.
Writer/director Kristoffer Borgli walks a tightrope as his goal is to make the audience uncomfortable, but not torture them to the point that the movie becomes an endurance test.
It helps that, in spite of the secrecy around the marketing, the stakes in this film are ultimately pretty low and what Borgli perfectly taps into is the anxiety couples feel before a wedding as they wonder, “Is this really the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?”
This certainly isn’t a movie for everyone and if you’re not a fan of being gently nudged out of your comfort zone, you might want to pass on this invitation.
But if you can handle a little mess, you might just find that the most exciting part of “The Drama” isn’t the movie itself, but the conversations it’s likely to inspire. What would you do if you were placed in Emma and Charlie’s shoes? The answers might surprise you.
“The Drama” is rated R for language, sexual content, and some violence.
