It’s a common truism that you can never truly “know” a person, even your nearest and dearest, a reality that Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli explores in his mercilessly uncomfortable, impudently funny fashion in The Drama. Starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a couple whose wedding is upended by a drunken confession, the film allows Borgli to push his finger-in-the-eye filmmaking ethos to the outer limits of palatability in what’s easily his blackest antisocial social comedy yet, making his two previous features, Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario, feel practically pleasant by comparison.
Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) are a well-to-do, happily engaged couple from Boston hard at work preparing for their looming wedding when, one night on the street, they happen to spot their DJ, Pauline (Sydney Lemmon), smoking what they assume to be heroin. Later, while tasting dishes for their reception, this leads to a conversation with their best friends, married couple Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), about secrets and morality, leading the foursome to dare each other to admit the worst thing they’ve ever done.
Mike, Rachel, and Charlie’s sins range from the mildly sociopathic to the anodyne: locking a kid in a closet, using a partner as a shield against an attacking dog, and cyberbullying. But when Emma blurts out a confession about her high school years, it throws the hangout into disarray and leaves Charlie wondering just who exactly he’s getting married to.
The nature of Emma’s secret is indeed shocking, and Borgli could be accused of tastelessness if The Drama weren’t so perfectly calibrated. Smash and jump cuts abound, with Borgli and editor Joshua Raymond Lee using them to great comic effect to deflate any po-faced seriousness and pull laughs from the audience between every gasp and cringe. Zendaya and Pattinson find a believable truth beneath the absurd catch-22 of their characters’ situation, and Haim is wonderfully grating as Emma’s moralistic maid of honor. Hailey Gates also warrants a mention for a low-key but no less scene-stealing turn as Charlie’s apathetic co-worker.
Borgli’s coup de grâce is The Drama’s climactic wedding sequence, which, naturally, provides him with ample opportunity to stage the sorts of extended displays of public humiliation that he favors across his work. The film may not quite hit the mortifying highs of its obvious forebears, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, given their especially dark revelations, but its climax is memorably unbearable nonetheless.
Ultimately, though, the film ends on a sweet note that makes its topical provocations go down smoother. Early in The Drama, Charlie says to Emma, “I love how you always find a way to turn my drama into a comedy,” and the film is as much about the stories couples tell themselves about themselves as it is the truths they may have neglected to mention along the way. Borgli delights in creating a hypothetical trap for his lovers, but he also acknowledges that there’s something romantic about being stuck in it together.
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