‘The Drama’: Something old, something new, something untrue

Could you ever tell your deepest, darkest secret to a room full of your closest friends? No, not the embarrassing anecdote you “can’t believe you’re admitting to”, but the kind you swear is from another life.

This precise discomfort charts the slow unravelling of Emma (Zendaya) in A24’s ‘The Drama’ — a jittery, faintly sinister film first marketed as a romcom, almost as a joke.

We meet her in a sunlit Boston cafe, where Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a British museum curator, first falls into the idea of her. She reads; he stares. She’s nonchalant; he’s awkward — a trait I am certain Pattinson has written into his contracts the way he’s been playing it since his ‘Twilight’ days, but doing so effortlessly, so no complaints.

Their meet-cute falters, resets — a quiet do-over that becomes motif. In the present, as Charlie rehearses his vows, we speedrun through the soft-focus milestones: first date, first kiss, the sort of apartment that exists only in films about people who insist they don’t care about money.

And then, wine intervenes (doesn’t it always?).

At a wedding menu tasting with maid of honour and best man Rachel (Alana Haim) and her husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie), a parlour game emerges: confess the worst thing you’ve ever done.

Rachel locked a mentally disabled child in a closet. Mike once used his girlfriend as a human shield against a stray dog. Charlie admits to cyberbullying as a teen.

And then Emma speaks.

(Major spoilers ahead — but I promise you, there’s no way to write about this film without them.)

As a lonely, bullied 15-year-old, she planned a mass school shooting. She never went through with it — she just liked the aesthetic of it.

The film doesn’t explode after this like it should, it seeps as a slow corrosion of something that once felt effortless. Suspicion, fear, infidelity, inebriation, and the creeping realisation that love may not survive full disclosure.

Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli refuses easy moral footing. Emma is neither monster nor martyr; the film resists the urge to neatly condemn her, even as it lets the discomfort linger. Charlie becomes its trembling centre — Pattinson wears him, beautifully, with a jittery, almost vacant naivety that curdles into dread.

Zendaya is, expectedly, excellent — quietly in control, almost too graceful for the chaos she’s asked to contain, though a flicker of the Disney alum’s affectation slips through once or twice.

Their chemistry works because Pattinson is chivalrous enough to know when to disappear against her prowess.

And unlike most plots lazily branded as dramedy, ‘The Drama’ is actually funny — sharply, often uncomfortably so — mining humour from people too self-aware to be sincere.

Borgli’s satire cuts in the margins: these well-heeled thirty-somethings are blind to those beneath them — the wedding DJ, the chef, the general entitlement to service.

In the run-up to the film, A24 leaned into the illusion, announcing the couple’s betrothal in The Boston Globe’s Engagements section. Zendaya — who, alongside her stylist Law Roach, popularised ‘method dressing’ on red carpets — extended her performance beyond the film, nodding to “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” in her premiere looks, while her hair and makeup grew progressively darker, charting her character’s quiet undoing in silk and shadow.

Yet the film falters in rhythm. It lingers too long, then rushes too much. By the time the wedding arrives, you’re not really devastated, just dulled.

A romance that curdles, a joke that lingers a beat too long, ‘The Drama’ is — oddly — as arresting as it is exhausting.