By Ella Lowry
*Spoilers ahead for “The Drama” (2026)*
Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama” (2026), an A24 romantic comedy in name
only, starts off looking like a familiar love story and slowly turns into
something far more unsettling. Starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, the
film has been heavily discussed online for its twists, so I went to Cinemark
Towson to see what the conversation was really about. What I didn’t expect
was a movie that constantly asks you to sit with discomfort instead of
resolution.
At first, everything feels deceptively normal. Emma and Charlie meet,
connect, and fall into a relationship that looks almost ideal on the surface.
But Borgli plants small fractures early on. One of the most telling is Charlie
casually lying about having read Emma’s book. It’s a quick moment, easy to
miss, but it quietly sets the tone for everything that follows: this isn’t a love
story built on truth—it’s built on performance, misreading, and half-truths
people choose to ignore when they want something to work.
Then the film completely shifts.
The turning point comes when Emma reveals something from her past that
reframes everything: as a teenager, she once planned a mass shooting but
ultimately didn’t go through with it. The film doesn’t play this as a twist
meant to shock and move on—it lingers on it. Suddenly, every earlier
interaction becomes suspect. You’re no longer watching a romance; you’re
watching two people try to survive the weight of information that can’t be
unlearned.
What makes Emma so compelling is that the film refuses to flatten her into
anything simple. She isn’t framed as a villain, but she also isn’t softened
into innocence. Even her deafness—resulting from a rifle incident in her
past—becomes part of this larger visual language of consequence. Guns
show up throughout the film, not in an action sense, but as quiet reminders
that the past doesn’t stay in the past. That said, the repeated flashbacks and
visual callbacks sometimes over-explain what the film is already making
clear, slightly weakening their impact over time.
Charlie, on the other hand, is where things start to feel almost
uncomfortably real. He doesn’t immediately reject Emma or fully accept
her—he spirals. He starts comparing her past to other people’s worst
moments, almost like he’s trying to solve morality through math. It’s not
about understanding her anymore; it’s about finding a way to make staying
feel justified. Watching him do this is tense because it feels familiar—this
idea that love can be reasoned into overriding something deeply unsettling.
As the wedding approaches, everything tightens. What should feel romantic
instead feels staged and suffocating. The film leans into how weddings
themselves are performances—carefully curated happiness under pressure.
Emma wants simplicity, but the world around her insists on spectacle. Even
small interactions start to carry weight, especially when her more forgiving
reactions clash with Charlie’s increasingly judgmental ones.
Visually, the film becomes more unstable here in the best way. One of the
most striking choices is how Emma’s teenage self begins to appear overlaid
onto her present self during key moments—especially in the wedding
photography sequences. It creates this eerie collapse of time where Charlie
literally cannot separate who she was from who she is now. That tension
becomes the emotional center of the film: not what happened, but whether
anything can exist outside of it.
And then everything starts to break.
Charlie’s emotional unraveling reaches a breaking point through his
coworker Misha. What begins as emotional venting turns into boundary
collapse, ending in a kiss and a near sexual encounter that feels less like
betrayal and more like complete psychological shutdown. It’s one of the
most uncomfortable moments in the film—not because it’s surprising, but
because it feels like watching someone lose control in real time.
Emma’s collapse is quieter but just as devastating. When she overhears
guests discussing her past at the wedding, it doesn’t explode outward—it
implodes. She withdraws, drinks, and starts disappearing into herself. The
film captures this really sharply: judgment doesn’t need to be spoken
directly to become internalized. It spreads through tone, glances, and
silence.
By the time the wedding fully falls apart, it’s already emotionally over.
Charlie’s speech—where he finally confronts guests for their gossip and
moral judgment—lands somewhere between cathartic and chaotic. It tries
to name everything the film has been building toward: how quickly people
reduce others, how fragile “love” becomes under pressure, how public
perception quietly overtakes private truth.
And then the film refuses to resolve any of it.
The final scene, where Emma and Charlie meet again and act like strangers,
is deliberately cold. There’s no reunion, no reconciliation, no emotional
payoff. Just distance. After everything the film puts you through, that
choice feels almost aggressive in its restraint. It doesn’t ask you to feel
closure—it asks you to sit with the absence of it.
What “The Drama” does best is refuse easy answers. It’s not really a romantic
comedy, and it’s not trying to be. It’s a psychological study of what happens
when love collides with information that cannot be softened or explained
away. Emma and Charlie don’t function as heroes or villains—they function
as people stuck in something neither of them knows how to exit.
And by the end, the most unsettling part isn’t what Emma did in the past.
It’s how quickly everyone decides what it means for the present.