At what point is a red flag impossible to ignore? That’s the principal question posed in this combustible new drama from Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, which pushes the genres of romcom and marital drama to their very extremes. In fact, cinema has never known pre-wedding jitters quite like this.
Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) first encounter each other in a café and share a textbook meet-cute: she’s the bookstore clerk reading by the window and he’s the museum director who pretends to have read what she’s holding purely to strike up conversation.
In the blink of an eye they’re loved up and having dinner to sample catering options for their fast-approaching dream wedding. Their friends Rachel and Mike (a terrifically catty Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) mention how before they got married, they asked each other: what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? And that’s when the bombshell drops.
The skeleton in Emma’s closet is that she meticulously planned and intended to carry out a school shooting while at high school, only to stop short at the 11th hour. Naturally, this prompts Charlie to reconsider their relationship – and also causes a rupture in her friendship with maid-of-honour Rachel.
“You always find a way to turn my drama into comedy,” Charlie says early on while drafting his wedding speech, which becomes pivotal as the film launches into screwball comedy with a script that is both too on the nose and pleased with itself. The incendiary nature of Emma’s revelation means it is of little surprise that Eddington director Ari Aster is credited as a producer on The Drama, but Borgli’s film offers little social commentary on a subject that deserves sensitivity or interrogation.
The Drama has a similarly jet-black sense of humour, but somehow recalls all of Todd Solondz, Danish dinner-party-from-hell Festen and even 45 Years, starring Sir Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. Where the latter asked intelligent questions of spousal trust and repression, though, Borgli’s priority is merely making mischief.
In quoting Freud and referencing Louis Malle films, Charlie stretches relatability, while the couple’s ever-so-chic apartment stocked with houseplants and a spiral staircase wouldn’t look out of place in the wish-fulfilment romcoms of Nancy Meyers – only a title like It’s Complicated wouldn’t quite cover it for them, of course.
By the time a killer final scene rolls around, The Drama is somewhat limping over the line, but its leads lend a crucial heartbeat to a film frustratingly engineered for discourse, not depth.
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