Kristoffer Borgli makes films about people who can’t handle the truth about themselves. His 2023 A24 film Dream Scenario put Nicolas Cage inside a fame spiral he never asked for. The Drama does something more targeted: it puts two people in love inside a situation that strips away every polite fiction they rely on. What’s left is not pretty, and Borgli is not interested in making it pretty.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are engaged and a week away from getting married. He is a museum curator in Boston. She works at a bookstore. They met in a cafe, fell fast, and by every visible measure, things are good.
Then comes a late-night dinner with their closest friends, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), a few too many drinks, and a game where everyone shares the worst thing they have ever done. Emma shares something true. The room shifts. And the film follows what happens when a secret does not disappear the way everyone expected.
Borgli does not reveal Emma’s confession until it becomes unavoidable, and that restraint is one of the film’s better decisions. The audience sits where Charlie sits: knowing something is wrong, uncertain how wrong, watching everyone around Emma decide for her what kind of person she is. Rachel turns cold. Mike follows. Charlie cannot stop thinking about it. The word “empathy” comes up repeatedly in conversations between the four of them, which is Borgli’s sharpest, most pointed joke: nobody in the room actually has any.
Zendaya Carries the Film’s Emotional Weight
Zendaya’s performance is the most interesting thing in the film. She is working in a quieter register than anything she did in Challengers or Euphoria. Emma listens more than she speaks. She sits across from people who are recalibrating their opinion of her in real time, and Zendaya makes you feel every second of that recalibration without underlining it.
There is also a racial dimension to how Emma’s secret is received, particularly by Rachel, that the film gestures toward and then does not fully pursue. That is a real missed opportunity. Borgli sets up something genuinely uncomfortable and blinks.
Pattinson is well cast as a man whose love turns out to have conditions attached. Charlie is not a villain. He wants to be the person who stays. But his fixation on Emma’s past becomes a kind of erosion, and Pattinson tracks that shift with precision. The scenes where Charlie brings it up again, even after Emma has asked him to stop, are the film’s most uncomfortable, which is the point.
The supporting work from Haim and Athie is credible but thinly written. The film uses them mostly as pressure, as people whose judgment accelerates Charlie’s doubt, rather than as characters with their own interiority. A subplot involving flashbacks to Emma’s high school years lands flat and breaks the carefully built tension of the first half.
The Drama works best when it is a film about how people perform tolerance and openness until they are actually tested. The wedding week structure, the photographer appointments, the florist meetings, the dance coordinator, all of it becomes a kind of theater that Emma and Charlie keep up while their relationship collapses behind closed doors.
Borgli is good at depicting that gap between what couples show the world and what they do at home, and the film has a dry, mean humor running through those sequences.
Where it falls short is in its ambitions. Borgli is clearly interested in cancel culture, in how quickly moral judgment gets activated, in how rarely people extend grace to someone who has already served their consequences. Those ideas are present, but they do not crystallize. The film raises the question of whether Charlie and Emma can survive honesty, then answers it in a way that feels abrupt rather than earned.
Still, The Drama is worth your time. Zendaya, in particular, is doing something genuinely considered here, a performance built on withholding, and it is the kind of work that becomes clearer the more you think about it afterward. Borgli has not made a perfect film, but he has made a specific and honest one. That counts for something.
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