Kristoffer Borgli - The Drama (2026), 5/10

The latest A24 production, Borgli’s The Drama explores the limits of love and empathy through Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), a young engaged couple preparing for marriage. The narrative begins with a cookie-cutter romantic comedy plot and style, leaning into genre tropes and poking fun at both the style’s form and the film's characters. This stylistic introduction comes to a screeching halt, however, when the couple shares drinks with their best man (Mike) and maid of honor (Rachel), where all four characters share the “worst thing they’ve ever done”. The contents of this conversation drive the remainder of the film, and while some of the reactions are less than relatable, they are at least passingly believable. The film plays with our idea of the individual self and our relationship with others, particularly in romantic relationships where there is a societal expectation to reveal our “complete” selves to our partners, including the worst aspects of our character. Emma is pressured into revealing her secret to the entire group rather than just his partner, and as we witness, the result is damaging to everyone involved, and further the entire wedding party. The confusion begins here, however, when we are presented in a practically inarguably worse ethical issue, which is never again discussed, referenced, or mentioned, only existing to vilify Rachel’s character, a regrettable theatrical choice over a realistic portrayal of social relationships or a larger moral/ethical conversation. This does not take away from the crux of the narrative’s issue, however, being its underdeveloped characters. The film leans unapologetically into demanding sympathy from the audience, but the script does not provide quite enough material to make a lasting impression through Charlie or Emma’s characters. 

Emma’s “sin” is an interesting topic of discussion, but the only truly interesting commentary we receive on the issue are via Emma and Charlie’s visions, and Charlie’s apt attempt at sympathy, despite his humorous lies draped across his conversation with friends. Emma’s flashbacks do not bear enough heavy lifting to make her character complete or rounded, and while this may work in another depiction of lost or angst-driven youth, her character feels underwhelming and at its worst entirely incomplete. His proposal that seemingly anyone could have dark thoughts we are unaware of is an explicit laying out of the film’s moral and ethical issue at hand, and his character attempts to explore its implications, but while he is realistically stunted by his selfishness, we do not get to see the end of the film’s consequences on the relationship. While Emma is defined by her relationship to the past, Charlie is a slave to the future. His anxiety visually manifests through quantum alternate-reality visions, one of the more interesting temporal experiments in the film. These scenes depict the reality of anxiety: a “lived” experience through emotive storytelling that the characters experience, feel, and reflect on before/during engaging with one another. His anxiety also manifests through his physicality, both a product of his tendency towards obsessiveness and his growing physical weakness. The narrative pinnacle of the film, the wedding, feels like a rushed implosion; again a choice of the theatrical over the real, yet little is accomplished through this stylistic choice beyond mere spectacle. This is followed by Charlie’s “dancing” scene, a masturbatory acting piece that only serves to test Pattinson’s acting limits rather than furthering the film’s effectiveness, a theme thankfully repeated only a few times during the story. The final scene embodies the strengths and weaknesses of the film, presenting a play on the romantic comedy, a complementary move that uses the genre’s feeling to play with audience’s expectations without fully subverting them. Just as in the rest of the film, we are left with a feeling of confused interest rather than existential or theoretical satisfaction.