Movies are a lot like houses. We’re invited inside and make ourselves at home. We get to know the people who live there and briefly get swept up in their lives. We cheer for their fortunes, we cry for their misfortunes, and we take sides in their conflicts. Some houses are comfy, some are gross, but Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama” isn’t either of those. It’s immaculate, even lavish, and full of interesting people, but the vibes are very, very off. Some movies, like some houses, feel haunted. And “The Drama” is haunted by Woody Allen.
Yeah, it’s a weird vibe. Borgli’s recent films, 2023’s “Dream Scenario” and now “The Drama,” are both about neurotic intellectuals sabotaging their lives and relationships after a bizarre turn of events. Borgli’s protagonists have mature veneers but immature emotions, and they collapse when pressure is applied. His movies funny, uncomfortably so, and that makes them feel a little honest. They’re sympathetic towards people with enormous flaws, and that makes them feel a little challenging. And it’s also, fundamentally, very Allen-esque.
Granted, in a vacuum it’s just another framework for dramas, comedies and dramedies about relationship woes, but “The Drama” doesn’t just evoke the wit of Allen’s movies. It also evokes the underlying creepiness. Celebrated Allen films like “Manhattan” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” don’t play like complex stories about complex people anymore, they play like self-defensive confessions, and “The Drama’s” empathy for its protagonists’ horrible sins has a similar, self-absorbed quality. Lots of filmmakers can be imitated to great effect but few have as much ugly baggage as Woody Allen, so “The Drama” isn’t merely tense, and it isn’t merely dark. It’s disquieting, and even though it’s also riveting, it’s difficult to shake the sense that everyone is getting away with something they shouldn’t.
Charlie (Robert Pattinson) is engaged to Emma (Zendaya), and their lives seem perfect. They have cute stories, they have great sex, they have successful careers, they have close friends. A week before the wedding, Charlie and Emma and their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) are drinking, talking and playing a game. They’re all about to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. The implication is that this is a safe space, because everyone knows each other, and nobody will be judged entirely based on their biggest mistakes. That is, until Emma reveals what she actually did. Or almost did. That’s when everything falls apart.
Her revelation is supposed to be a secret, so it isn’t in any of the marketing, so let’s not spoil it. In fact, “The Drama” is such an intellectual exercise that it hardly matters what it is, just that it’s horrible and easy to judge. The point is that her friends turn on her, her life could be ruined if the truth was exposed and Charlie is in a tight spot. He understands that she’s changed, he knows she’s grown a lot as a person, and he also knows he can’t unlearn this ugly truth — and he might not be in love with her anymore.
“The Drama” watches in fascinated horror as Charlie self-destructs in slow-motion and takes damn near everyone else with him. Robert Pattinson and Zendaya are some of the most versatile actors of this generation, and the opportunity to gorge themselves on this much outer and inner conflict was too tempting to pass up. They devour “The Drama” in little nibbles and gigantic bites. There’s subtlety in their work and, for Pattinson in particular, also a few exaggerated, yet well-earned outbursts.
Arseni Khachaturan’s grim cinematography keeps palette dark, dark, dark. Borgli’s screenplay darts between genuine psychological horror and goofy rom-com antics, as though a Garry Marshall movie was accidentally rewritten a third of the way through by Neil Labute. There’s still laughter but it’s all nervous laughter. Joshua Raymond Lee’s editing keeps us hyper-aware of how everyone’s subconscious is leaking, intrusively, into all of their thoughts.
So this should, by all rights, be a bleak comedy. But Borgli has a lot of sympathy for these weird, often terrible people. It’s the kind of sympathy that’s easy to celebrate when you give a film like “The Drama” the benefit of the doubt, and assume its heart is nestled snugly in the right place. But when you evoke the films of Woody Allen in every scene, you also awaken that same lack of trust. We’ve been burned by films like “The Drama” before, and so we might find ourselves giving Borgli’s film the side-eye. Are we all laughing at the same moments? Are we all shocked by the same things? And can we really take this movie’s word for it that these characters deserve our sympathy?
Maybe. That’s probably the point. The thing about people is, we do kinda suck. We act like we’re decent human beings but on a long enough timeline everyone eventually screws up, sometimes so horribly it ruins lives. Maybe our own, maybe the lives of others. If you haven’t yet, and you’re feeling pretty smug right now, just give it time. You make a million tiny decisions a day, and probably dozens of big ones. Do you really think you’ll do everything right forever? The odds aren’t just against you, they’re astronomical.
But a Woody Allen-ish film should know that, thanks to people like Woody Allen, there are lines that can’t be uncrossed, and “The Drama” makes it its business to sidle right up to those lines. So it’s hard to trust the characters. It’s even hard to trust the filmmaker. And that keeps “The Drama” at arm’s length when it should be pulling us inward, making its bizarre problems our own.
It’s fascinating, and it’s complex, and by god the performances are amazing, but it’s difficult to latch unto, and it’s too unsettling — intentionally, and possibly otherwise — to fully enjoy. That’s the risk it takes. You can’t throw yourself off a building without risking injury, and while “The Drama” survives the fall, and even walks away afterwards, something inside it definitely feels sprained.
