What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Is it bad enough to call off a wedding? Soon-to-be newlyweds Emma and Charlie find out in The Drama, a rollercoaster of a movie that veers from heartfelt romance to heart-in-your-throat anxiety.
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play the couple with all the drama in The Drama. We’re given a glimpse of their courtship in an awkward but nevertheless charming meet cute before being thrown into the week of their wedding.
Amidst all the planning for the big day, Emma and Charlie have dinner with their best man and maid of honor, played by Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim. Things take a turn for the worst, however, when maid of honor Rachel pries an embarrassing confession from everyone at the table. It’s all fun and games until Emma admits something so upsetting, sinister and downright shocking that the central romance — and, indeed, the movie we think we’re watching up until that moment — screeches to a halt and shifts gears into something else entirely.
Now, without giving away any spoilers, let me just say that Emma’s confession is truly unexpected, primarily due to its taboo nature. It’s something that’s rarely dramatized on the big screen — and for good reason. It’s difficult to do so without resorting to exploitation and controversy for the sake of controversy.
Ari Aster, who serves as one of the producers for The Drama, is often guilty of this filmmaking sin. His movies, such as Midsommar and Eddington, heavily rely on shock tactics to distract from the fact that their central narratives are emotionally shallow and logically incoherent.
You can see some of that going on in The Drama. But unlike Aster, the film’s writer-director Kristoffer Borgli brings a bit more substance to his storytelling. Borgli previously turned heads with Dream Scenario, a similarly anxiety-filled film starring Nicolas Cage as a man who is vilified for committing heinous acts in people’s dreams.
That movie was an imaginative and darkly funny satire, but it was ultimately hindered by its juvenile approach to “cancel culture” (for a more nuanced and thought-provoking treatise on the subject, watch the Todd Field film Tár).
With The Drama, Borgli seems to have taken some screenwriting notes. Unlike Cage’s character in Dream Scenario, Zendaya and Pattinson are more grounded, more emotionally complex and, frankly, more real. Neither of them are caricatures, and, crucially, neither of them are wholly victims or victimizers.
It helps that Zendaya and Pattinson have such palpable on-screen chemistry, which elevates the film’s most emotionally raw and intimate moments (The Drama actually marks the first of what will be three 2026 collaborations for Zendaya and Pattinson, with The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three coming later this year).
If you can forgive The Drama for some of its detours into surface-level shock and cringe comedy (influences from Aster, I’m sure), you’ll find a film that’s predictably provocative but also surprisingly empathetic. Less about forgiveness than it is about understanding, The Drama gives an all-new meaning to the phrase “for better or worse.”
