Two couples. Too much wine. One loaded question: What鈥檚 the worst thing you鈥檝e ever done?
The revelations that tumble from that truth-or-dare-style drinking game badly test a young couple in baffling which wastes two of the planet’s most gorgeous people and will surely get everyone involved in trouble for using a current American tragedy as a plot point.
and star as Charlie Thompson and Emma Harwood, a genteel, engaged couple in Boston 鈥� he’s a museum curator and she’s a literary editor 鈥� whose relationship is upended when she reveals a dark secret from her past.
That secret shakes Charlie’s love for his intended, messes with work, affects his performance in bed and prompts him to spiral out, overacting at every step. Of course, it dents his desire to get married. Can he ever see his love in the same way again?
鈥淐an we just forget about it?鈥� she asks him. 鈥淚 don’t want you to fixate on this.鈥� But he can’t help it: He has visions, gets paranoid, watches friends 鈥� including a brilliant 鈥� run away.
鈥淭he Drama鈥� is billed as a 鈥渟exy, contemporary romantic comedy鈥� but the only accurate word in that description is 鈥渃ontemporary.鈥� The on-screen chemistry between Pattinson and Zendaya is more sibling-like 鈥� even before the revelation 鈥� and this is nowhere near a ha-ha rom-com Not many romantic comedies have projectile vomiting and bloody wounds.
How well you really know someone is legitimate grounds to explore in a romantic drama, but writer-director Borgli has stumbled by making a wedding satire while putting a finger into a societal raw gash that’s never something to use as a relationship test, which here is 鈥� spoiler alert 鈥� a school shooting.
It turns out Emma, as a bullied 15-year-old, planned a school assault with her dad’s shotgun but never went through with it. She even became an anti-gun advocate, but no matter. 鈥淪he’s obviously not the person you thought she was,鈥� says a friend.
The Norwegian Borgli, whose script namechecks French filmmaker Louis Malle and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, could have picked any subject to attempt to unmoor this couple 鈥� an affair, some pyromania, a minor felony, even an egregious dine-and-dash 鈥� but he picked a planned mass murder. And in a semi-comedy, or at least a cringe-comedy. It’s too much to ask of this couple 鈥� or this movie.
Zendaya has been something old, something new and something borrowed. She’s trolling us that she might be already married But, again, she’s also promoting a movie with an attempted school shooting.
Borgli leaves clues that his would-be couple are in trouble right from the beginning. In the first scene, Charlie spots Emma at a coffee shop and fibs about loving the book she’s reading, establishing lying at the basis of their relationship. We then watch them navigate the wedding-industrial complex, with visits to photographers and florists, mining humor from the weirdness of freelance wedding DJs and a very aggressive dance instructor. The fact that the couple emitted few sparks when they were in love compounds the lack of investment when that love collapses.
And yet the topic of school shootings 鈥� so cavalierly introduced 鈥� won’t go away. Borgli makes it almost a laugh line 鈥� in one scene, Charlie tosses Emma’s 鈥淐offee or I’ll Shoot鈥� mug into the trash. But the writer-director has miscalculated badly. Maybe he’s trolling America but 鈥淭he Drama鈥� is clearly the worst thing he鈥檚 ever done.
鈥淭he Drama,鈥� a A24 release that hits movie theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for 鈥渓anguage, sexual content and some violence.鈥� Running time: 104 minutes. One star out of four.
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