The Drama review: Robert Pattinson and Zendaya’s darkly comical romance is designed to stir controversy

If you saw the trailer for The Drama, and all those online videos of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson being cute while on the promotional hustings, you might think this movie is a rom-com.

It’s not. Well, it is, until it isn’t.

It presents are a rom-com for the young set, those Millennials who grew up with Pattinson and the Gen Z-ers who love Zendaya. They’re an ideal on-screen pairing for the internet girlies.

But The Drama is weirder than some adorable love story, and if you’ve seen writer and director Kristoffer Borgli’s previous film, the bizarre Dream Scenario with Nicolas Cage, you’d know that it’s going to go somewhere unexpected.

Yet, at the same time, it’s also not as strange or absurd as it could’ve been, and therefore, lands somewhere in the middle, not enough one thing or the other. Mid is an apt description for The Drama, which is neither offensive nor tremendous.

It’s just kind of fine.

Zendaya plays a young woman named Emma, who works in publishing, and Pattinson is Charlie, British ex-pat running a smaller museum. They live in a cool book-lined apartment, have cool friends and are to be married in a few days in what will surely be a cool wedding.

The film deploys rom-com genre tropes by flashing back to various points in their romance (the meet-cute, the first date, the first kiss) to really get you to invest in Emma and Charlie and their future, which already has the advantage of Pattinson and Zendaya’s combine charisma.

So when The Drama shifts tone, you have a base from which to continue to care.

The premise is clever – while testing wines for the reception with their besties, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), they play a kind of parlour game in which each person has to confess to the worst thing they’ve ever done.

Charlie, Rachel and Mike all spill their secrets – childhood bullying, neighbourhood secrets, using an ex as a human shield – but it’s Emma’s revelation that immediately changes the energy.

It would be a massive spoiler to say what it is here, but her story is enough to make Rachel turn on her immediately and for Charlie to be so thrown that he questions whether he knows his fiancée at all.

Charlie’s sense of security and certainty about his life and his future starts to disintegrate as he tries to push himself through the days until the wedding, while Emma is in a spiral over whether Charlie still wants to marry her.

It’s one of The Drama’s flaws in that Pattinson’s character gets a lot more to do in this part of the film as it prioritises his perspective and experience, and Emma is shortchanged. For a film that is clearly meant to be balanced between its two leads, the shift is noticeable, and doesn’t feel like it was deliberate.

The ending also feels a bit like a predictable cop-out, like it couldn’t quite figure out what to do, which leaves a slight feeling of dissatisfaction.

The revelation is already stirring debate online as to whether or not it was appropriate/in good taste to use that particularly scenario in a film, but you get the sense it was designed to provoke.

Certainly you’ll walk out of the cinema asking yourself your view on it, and also what the worst thing you have done, which, if the film has taught us anything, is probably best kept to yourself.

The other controversy it has triggered is that an old article written by Borgli in his native Norway has resurfaced online, translated into English, in which he, then in his late 20s, talked about a May-December romance he had with a high school girl who was above the Norwegian age of consent of 16.

It was a defence of his actions, but the real kicker was when he argued that after watching the film Manhattan, he decided he would rather listen to Woody Allen than his friends. Awks.

The Drama seems keen to poke the bear.

Rating: 3/5

The Drama is in cinemas from April 2