'The Drama' Movie Review: A Clever, Unsettling Romance That Mistakes Repetition for Revelation

Mild spoilers ahead..

Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a jittery British art historian with the personality of a half-charged phone, meets Emma (Zendaya), a bookstore clerk, in what the film would very much like you to believe is a charming meet-cute.

It isn’t.

She can’t hear him properly; he compensates by parroting Goodreads reviews of a book he hasn’t read. It’s awkward and maybe mildly amusing. Emma asks for a do-over. They repeat the same beats. Nothing changes, except the film insists that something meaningful has happened. Cut to: they’re a week away from getting married.

Later, in bed, the film drops any pretence of charm. Charlie can’t get hard. His brain won’t stop clawing at what he’s just learned. He tries anyway and that makes everything worse. He grips Emma too tightly, because perhaps physical certainty might compensate for whatever is collapsing inside him, his body stubbornly refusing to follow instructions. It’s mechanical. Desperate. Emma, caught between concern and irritation, asks for a do-over. This time, the idea feels almost cruel. That’s essentially The Drama in a nutshell: a film obsessed with second chances but deeply uninterested in whether its characters are capable of doing anything differently the second time around.

A few days before the wedding, fuelled by pink wine and bad decisions, the couple decide to confess the worst thing they’ve ever done to each other. Emma’s revelation is meant to detonate the narrative. This is the big twist that makes The Drama controversial, and from here on, the film pivots from rom-com to something darker, or at least it tries to. The problem is that director Kristoffer Borgli, who previously made the absurd Dream Scenario, seems to believe that shock is a substitute for depth. The film flirts with questions about morality, guilt, and the kind of world we’re building, then promptly loses interest and retreats into the safer, smaller drama of whether two attractive people can stay in love.

There’s a moment involving Charlie’s co-worker (a stunning Hailey Gates) that the film treats almost casually, which is precisely why it lands like a slap. Charlie, already coming apart, asks her the worst thing she’s ever done. She says it's cheating. And then the film immediately undercuts that neat little moral filing system.

What follows isn’t some sweeping lapse or torrid escalation. It’s clumsy, abrupt, almost graceless; Charlie lunges, kisses her, grabs at her without thinking. There’s a brief struggle with fabric, buttons fly off, and then just as abruptly, she turns around, braces herself against the table, and that’s that. Decision made. Line crossed. Again.

What’s striking isn’t heat or chemistry. It’s the absence of both. The whole thing has the emotional weight of a shrug. There is no seduction, no visible conflict, no burning desire. Just falling back into the exact thing she had, moments ago, named as wrong. This is where The Drama is at its most honest, and also its most unsettling. People here don’t betray their values in dramatic, operatic ways. They just… abandon them. It’s a habit. The Drama clocks this with dry indifference that feels far more cutting than any moralising ever could be.

And yet, the film clings to the idea of do-overs as if repetition itself is romantic. Charlie’s second attempt at meeting Emma is identical to the first—same line, same borrowed opinion, same lack of curiosity.

Borgli doesn’t care which side you take. In fact, he doesn’t seem to care if you take a side at all. The film gestures vaguely at moral ambiguity, then shrugs. It wants to be edgy, uncomfortable, maybe even provocative, but settles for being smug. It positions its central couple as misunderstood, while anyone who might judge them is framed as sanctimonious. This would be interesting if the film had any real understanding of its characters. But it doesn’t. Emma, in particular, is written with surface-level complexity that collapses the moment you look at it too closely. Her psychological, gendered, and racial realities are treated like decorative flourishes rather than lived experiences.

Visually, the film strains for significance. Odd angles, ominous music, jump cuts. But style without substance is just noise. The tension builds, then dissolves into punchlines that don’t always land.

To its credit, The Drama does make you uncomfortable. I would argue that it might not be the discomfort that was intended; it’s the discomfort of watching a film circle big ideas without ever committing to them, of seeing characters treated as mysteries when they barely qualify as people, of wondering if a heinous crime was only used for its shock value. The film keeps pushing you into discomfort, daring you to sit with it, offering no relief. Your moral bearings are entirely your own to deal with. If I got a do-over, I’d spend those two hours on Super Mario Galaxy instead.