“The Drama” is a love story spliced with surgical precision and squandered by tonal confusion — at once intoxicating, glib and deeply misjudged.
There’s a version of the film that exists entirely within its editing: a work of rhythm, fracture and emotional whiplash that feels formally daring and, at moments, genuinely electric. It’s the version that opens the movie where Kristoffer Borgli makes his strongest case: that time, memory and intimacy can be rearranged into something truer than linear narrative.
We fall into Charlie’s (Robert Pattinson) vows as he describes his first encounter with Emma (Zendaya), the cadence of her laugh and the frenetic quality of their first kiss rendered in staccato cuts and economical detail. The result is a compressed, intoxicating portrait of romantic devotion — and it ends before the title card even appears.
It’s some of the most confident editing in recent memory.
It’s also, regrettably, wasted on this movie.
The film’s central rupture arrives far earlier than expected, not as a late-stage twist, but as the inciting fracture. At a drunken tasting with their best man and maid of honor — Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) — Charlie and Emma participate in a confessional game: Admit the worst thing you’ve ever done. Rachel recounts locking a cognitively delayed child in a derelict shack in the woods and staying silent as a police search was launched for him, while Emma admits to having once fantasized about committing a school shooting.
The film gestures toward sympathy for Emma, and largely earns it. Haim’s portrayal of Rachel is sharply drawn, emulating the kind of person who mines others’ pain for social currency. It’s infuriating, legible and real.
Emma’s backstory, meanwhile, is rendered through a genuinely inventive structural device. As she explains the confession she made the night before, the film slips into scenes from her adolescence in which the teenage Emma (Jordyn Curet) physically speaks the words being narrated by her older self. Simultaneously, Charlie begins projecting this younger, wounded version of Emma onto his own memories and imagined scenarios, inserting her into moments and gestures drawn from their adult relationship. The effect is less literal flashback than emotional reconstruction — Emma reverts to the vulnerable self she associates with that period of her life, while Charlie becomes increasingly consumed by an imagined version of her he cannot fully reconcile with the woman he knows. Charlie’s imagined version of Emma supplements one of the film’s more compelling ideas: that we reconstruct the people we love, especially when faced with the parts of them we cannot understand.
But where the film becomes deeply problematic is in how it handles the weight of its subject matter.
In his wedding vows, Charlie writes: “I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy.” It’s the clearest articulation of what the film itself is doing: a drama determined to reframe material that reads as tragedy into comedy. The shift fully arrives in a scene involving the couple’s wedding photographer, who repeatedly uses the word “shoot” — the theater erupts. Permission is granted. And from that point forward, the audience is invited to smirk its way through subject matter that should, by any honest accounting, sit in their chest like a stone.
I am not a person who typically finds myself shut out by sensitive subject matter in film. I went in expecting to be unsettled; I wasn’t. I spent the movie chuckling alongside strangers at a topic that has stitched real, irreparable damage into the fabric of American life. That reaction doesn’t feel like catharsis. It feels like a failure of the material.
There is a brief but effective sequence from Emma’s youth, set during a school assembly following a nearby shooting, where the reality of violence punctures her earlier fantasies. It’s one of the few moments that suggests she never truly had the capacity to carry out what she imagined — that her fixation was less about violence than visibility, about wanting to feel seen. It’s a compelling idea, reinforced by her trajectory from anonymous obsession to public-facing advocacy.
But the film undercuts it almost immediately. Even in scenes of collective trauma, it pivots to irony: 1950s-style romantic music swells as a classmate becomes infatuated with her, redirecting attention away from loss and toward absurdity.
The pattern repeats. The film gestures toward meaning, then sidesteps it.
That same lack of clarity extends to the film’s engagement with contemporary ideas like “brain rot.” At Charlie’s job in a fictional Cambridge art museum, a mysterious book titled “Brain Rot” is left on his desk, and the scene lingers on his fixation as he flips through pages of hyper-stylized girls posing with weapons. Rather than interrogating the concept, the film treats it as an aesthetic cue that never fully grounds itself in how the term is actually understood or used.
Borgli, who serves as writer, director and co-editor, is Norwegian. I raise this not to disqualify him from the subject but to note that there is a specific texture to living inside American gun violence, not as political abstraction but as ambient dread. It’s something you think about in movie theaters and elementary schools and shopping malls that I’m not sure translates across the Atlantic fully intact.
His most explicit thematic statement, delivered through Charlie, reframes violent ideation as diffuse and systemic, suggesting that behind every shooting are countless others who considered it and turned away — that it could be anyone, and that the country itself bears blame. It gestures toward insight but lands like an import, observed rather than lived.
Even the ending reflects this evasiveness. Charlie and Emma meet at a diner, mirroring the opening: the same low hum tied to her deafness returns in the soundscape, and the same practiced “meeting for the first time” routine the film has already used twice. We are presumably meant to understand that they start over. It’s structurally neat and lands with a kind of narrative shrug. If the same ending could follow any twist, what does that say about the story that precedes it?
One final thing worth naming: the press campaign for “The Drama” leaned heavily into wedding stunts, Zendaya’s surprise appearances and a persistent fascination with Boston filming locations. I understand that a film still in wide release is constrained — perhaps the plot twist cannot be freely discussed; perhaps the promotional apparatus has its own logic. Art does not owe anyone a position. A film can live inside a subject without resolving it, and I believe there can be real value in that ambiguity. But when the work itself stays quiet, the people behind it carry a greater responsibility to speak — not as filmmakers, but as human beings operating in a country that is already suffocating under the weight of its own silence on this issue. Time will tell whether anyone involved in making this film wants to say something about it. The film itself, ultimately, does not.