The Drama

I liked The Drama. I wanted to love it. There is a difference, and the film lives in that gap for most of its running time.

The setup is simple. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) are engaged and about to get married. During the week before their wedding, Emma reveals something from her past, something that changes everything Charlie thought he knew about her. What she reveals involves a mass shooting. What follows is a film about love, trust, and what it means to forgive someone for something they cannot undo.

That is the film A24 did not put in the trailer. And it is also the reason The Drama is more interesting than it is satisfying.

Zendaya and Pattinson

The performances are the reason to see this film. Both of them are genuinely excellent and both of them are doing something specific and controlled that the film around them does not always deserve.

Pattinson plays Charlie with the particular quality he has mastered, the emotionally stuck man who is well meaning but unable to process anything at speed. He finds the exact pitch between sympathy and frustration that the character requires. Not easy to do.

But Zendaya is the film. Emma listens more than she speaks. She communicates regret and fragility through the discreet way she holds her body, and through choices that move with quiet precision across her face. She says very little in some scenes and fills every one of them completely. It is a performance built almost entirely on what is withheld, and it is the more extraordinary for it.

Alana Haim deserves more attention than she has been getting in conversations about this film. Playing Rachel, a close friend of Emma who knows the truth before Charlie does, Haim carries the awkward position of someone who loves two people and cannot protect either of them. She is funny and warm and then, when the film needs her to be, completely devastating. There is a scene at the dinner table where she says almost nothing and is the most interesting person on screen. She has been quietly excellent in everything she has done and The Drama is another reminder that she is one of the most natural performers working right now.

Anna Baryshnikov as Sam, a partially paralysed shooting survivor, is also quietly affecting. Nobody wastes their screen time. The film is well acted all the way through.

The Director

After this I need to check out more of Borgli's filmography. He is Norwegian, born in 1985, and this is only his third feature. I watched Dream Scenario and I loved it. Nicolas Cage appearing in strangers' dreams and the film using that strange premise to say something real about fame and how quickly people turn on you. It was original and smart and genuinely funny. The Drama has that same quality of using an unusual idea to talk about something serious. Borgli is a director worth following closely.

Where It Falls Short

The film is about gun violence in America. That is a big subject. And the film does not go far enough with it. It brings it up, it uses it to drive the story, and then it does not say much about it. America has a mass shooting problem that is unlike anything else in the world, and a director from outside America had a real chance here to look at it with fresh eyes. Borgli does not fully take that chance.

The film feels scared of its own subject. Charlie spends a lot of time reacting to what Emma tells him but his reaction never really goes anywhere deep. You keep waiting for the film to say something that hits you. It never quite does. You leave wishing it had been braver.