movie review
THE DRAMA
Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R. In theaters Friday.
Good thing it’s called “The Drama.”
A nice name like “The Wedding” would be extremely misleading. Even “The Couple” could end up a date-night disaster. Titling this oddity “The Drama” is, at least, not a bait and switch.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some furious theater walkouts about a half hour into the shocking A24 movie starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
That’s when a nuclear revelation completely rewires this tricky movie’s whole identity. What exactly am I watching here? Well, what you definitely are not at is a romantic comedy. Don’t enter expecting to smile. Many will leave having experienced “The Trauma.”
For the brave, avoid any spoilers or even vague whispers at all costs. Going in cold, you’ll never guess the bombshell. Be warned: When the scene arrives, you might absolutely loathe it.
Even if what happens after that jaw-dropper doesn’t pack the same punch — how can it? — much of “The Drama” is gripping, quite stressfully so, and it’s sometimes stomach-churning in the topical subjects it touches.
Look, this is not a pleasant experience. But it’s an admirably tough one to shake.
The unhinged film, written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, begins with Pattinson’s neurotic Charlie eyeing a cool girl, Emma, at a coffee shop.
He quietly waits until she gets up to use the bathroom, dashes over and quickly snaps a picture of the book she’s reading. Then he lies to Emma, who is deaf in one ear, that it’s one of his favorite novels.
So, fidgety Charlie’s a stalker creep, right? Maybe. But his little fib works. The film fast-forwards to the week of their wedding. Charlie, a museum curator, is hard at work on his gushy groom speech and Emma is making final touches to the catering menu and the DJ.
They’re a sweet pair. Regardless of their inarguable good looks, both have an outcast aura and together they share a geeky shorthand. A good match, you think.
And then, er, things change.
Like a solar eclipse, “The Drama” abruptly darkens. The viewer watches on in a state of petrified nervousness bordering on dread as their lives unravel.
You genuinely don’t know who you’re dealing with or what they’re going to do next. Jokes are still cracked, but exclusively the morbid sort.
Borgli’s scenes are fast and disorienting. Some are from the characters’ imaginations. Others are flashbacks going back months or years.
In the spiraling present, Charlie’s idiosyncrasies, which were initially endearing, become the twitches and stutters of a sleepless paranoiac. Emma’s stylish, put-together exterior starts to freak you out.
That Zendaya and Pattinson so ably flip the switch speaks to their skill for genre-hopping — from “Harry Potter” to “Mickey 17”; “Euphoria” to “Spider-Man.”
This time it’s from bliss to torment.
There are just a few other characters, mainly another couple, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), who are their best man and maid of honor.
Athie is a grounded actor, a preternatural voice of reason who has the calm of a therapist advising a screaming patient. And Haim, who was exceptional in “Licorice Pizza,” embodies everybody’s judgmental friend at Sunday brunch.
It’s not oversharing to say that the movie fits neatly in the family of “How well do you know the person you share your bed with?” films.
But the unsaid question posed here — “What would I do if I learned this game-changing information about my betrothed?” — is explosively provocative.
It can and will fuel hours of heated debate.
“The Drama,” for all its heat, is not perfect. I wasn’t won over by its climactic series of calamities that fall in rapid succession like dominoes at the end.
However, most movies are completely forgotten by the time the credits roll. This one, like it or not, lingers for days. It’ll likely wind up one of the most controversial movies of the year.
