Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Weddings are all about the drama right? So, things are not very different for Emma (Zendaya), a young American all set to marry her British boyfriend Charlie (Robert Pattinson). The two cannot get on the same page about what to dance on, what their menu should be, blah, blah, blah. To make things worse, Charlie starts to get serious cold feet when the two get drunk and reveal what’s the worst thing they’ve done. Well, Charlie doesn’t really reveal much, but Emma’s secret from her teens really jolts her fiance.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, ‘Drama’ opens with Charlie recalling how he met Emma to his best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie), using the story as an anecdote in his wedding vows. While Charlie works in a Museum, Emma is a literary editor and the two are madly in love until Mike’s wife Rachel (Alana Haim) instigates a ‘let’s tell each the worst thing we’ve done’ and things start to fall apart.
The Drama plays out like a satire in which the lead couple is forced to reassess their relationship after disturbing revelations emerge, asking whether love can survive learning something from a partner’s past that suddenly makes them seem slightly unhinged, even if that past is long buried. The irony lies in the fact that Rachel admits to something truly awful, while Emma receives the harshest judgment for something she does not even end up doing. Her “secret” is merely about something awful she considers doing, not something she actually does.
One of the Drama’s best ideas is a recurring sequence where Charlie sees Emma as her teenage self (Jordyn Curet) after learning unsettling things about her past. It’s an effective and often hilarious metaphor that captures both Charlie’s growing sense that he no longer knows Emma, and Emma’s own feeling of being emotionally reverted into a judged, misunderstood teen. Emma does conceal something major about her past, so Charlie’s shaken trust in her is understandable to an extent. But the way they handle the entire crisis gives off the impression that these two probably should not be getting married in the first place.
Alana Haim is brilliantly un-likable as Rachel, the hypocritical friend who decides to stop being Emma’s maid of honor because she once entertained a horrible idea as a teenager, even though Rachel herself has done something far worse than merely thinking about it. Now of course, Rachel conveniently turning someone else into the bigger villain is understandable, most people like believing they are morally better than those around them.
What irritated me about The Drama, though, is how Emma simply absorbs all of Rachel’s tantrums instead of pushing back even once. Honestly, why even let Rachel attend the wedding if she is going to spend the entire time acting like a self-righteous, whiny nightmare? In-fact, it would’ve been more in character for Rachel herself to boycott the wedding, but it seems like her husband convinces her to do come along.
In the end though, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie easily takes the crown for The Drama’s most frustrating character, especially considering he gets an ending that feels far kinder than he deserves (keeping things vague for spoiler reasons). Charlie is messy, evasive, and utterly incapable of holding himself together. The wedding itself is not cancelled, but it becomes a complete disaster thanks to Charlie running around like a panicked chicken, making all the worst possible decisions at every turn.
As far as the onscreen chemistry between Zendaya and Robert Pattinson goes, it is surprisingly lukewarm. The two share a few intimate onscreen scenes, and Charlie constantly gushes about how they have “great sex,” but this fresh pairing unfortunately works far better aesthetically than emotionally. If you want recent examples of genuinely electric onscreen chemistry, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh in ‘We Live in Time’ immediately come to mind. Even Dakota Fanning had more natural spark opposite both Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in Materialists.
While many aspects of ‘The Drama’ feel authentic, and darkly funny, some of its twists, exaggerated intentionally for satirical effect, still come across as a little too contrived in their desperation to justify the film’s title. The ending is emotional, and probably would have felt genuinely adorable had this been a more straightforward romantic drama. But it isn’t. Ultimately, ‘The Drama’ is a well-made film that feels more like a parody of modern relationships than an earnest examination of them.
The Drama is available on rent on Prime Video.
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