The Drama is a (in my opinion) dark comedy that follows a whirlwind week where an engaged couple are finalizing their wedding when an unexpected revelation changes the vibe and threatens to ruin their big day. It stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in the lead roles.
This will be a short review that will be very much tiptoeing around the main conflict because I strongly believe that the reveal itself is best experienced while watching and seeing the fallout. To avoid delving too much into things, I will focus on other things and keep this short and sweet. I will not be spoiling the reveal, but if you really want to be fully blind, maybe it’s best to avoid this review because there will probably be some hints to the general vibe of the reveal.
I am going to preface the whole review with something that is obvious, but sometimes bears repeating: this is all my personal opinion. It is perfectly valid for you to feel very differently about the subject matter and the way it was handled, and if anything, that to me is the best part of this film and is a main feature of it.
Point 1: The Art of Discomfort
Let’s get it out of the way: the reveal doesn’t pull punches. It is a very polarizing topic that I thought was a great artistic choice to make. I think that Kristoffer Borgli finds the perfect reveal to ride the line of disturbing, but challenging both the characters and the audience to consider whether it is a dealbreaker or if it requires empathy.
The film then does not prescribe the correct way to address it either. It instead revels in the discomfort of the topic – both emotionally for the character who revealed it as well as for the people who learned of it and how they deal with it. Then, to add on to that, the film constantly employs the classic anxiety reaction of cracking jokes to cover discomfort, and the fact that the jokes are not landing for the characters makes it land for the audience. It really employs this meta layered comedy style that oscillates between “should I be laughing at that?” and bursting out from sheer pent up discomfort over the scene.
You’ll be unsurprised that this movie has Ari Aster involved albeit as just a producer. Maybe I should have started this point with that fact…
Speaking of anxiety, much of the film is very much an encapsulation of anxiety. After the reveal, suddenly everything comes back to what was revealed. Everything is reframed and normal things suddenly bring everything back to the one thing you are trying to not think about. Thoughts and memories are suddenly tainted and it’s hard to look past this new information even though otherwise you would have and have been thinking of them as positive this whole time. I really felt it was a thoughtful way of exploring the fallout and taking a film that focuses solely on this one thing rather than having it as a side thing in a larger story.
This aspect is in my opinion best experienced in a theater just to react along with the crowd and see where you might find comedy compared to others. Or in my case, see how many people walk out soon after the reveal.
Point 2: No Right Answers
To expand on the aspect of not prescribing the correct reaction, the writing does not endorse an right answer either. The characters all have their own point of view on it and react in diverse ways. You are likely to find someone to really hook onto as your proxy for your reaction to the reveal. The only point of view omitted is someone who thinks it’s no big deal, which is probably the right decision given the subject matter and would have probably turned off everyone to have someone like that.
The film also does not shy away from exposing how people can become hypocritical and arbitrarily decide to draw lines for some things and not others while not telling you whether it’s right or wrong. When others reveal things about their lives, they find reasons for why it’s not so bad but when this specific reveal happens, the mood shifts. Those same reasons could be applied to this reveal too, but are accepted as not being valid anymore. The movie does the right thing by still addressing this and using each character’s perspective to justify why or why not something may not be a relevant lens to see this through.
The one example I can give you without revealing anything in the main story is that the couple, before the reveal happens, see the DJ they have hired for their wedding smoking crack on the street. This leads to the couple and their best friends who are to be the maid of honour and best man discussing this. Opinions are thrown around about whether someone doing drugs has any bearing on someone being a DJ at the wedding, if heroin isn’t innocent enough to be ignored, if it’s none of their business, and on and on. This one instance is a micro-parallel to the main story of why we think what we think and how we see the world. The way it concludes adds more moral grey area to how you see the main story and characters as well.
Point 3: Experimental In A Good Way
The film makes a lot of decisions that are very indie and experimental that a more traditional film covering the same topic would not make. It is filmed almost exclusively handheld and the rough movements add a layer of intimacy to scenes. When the choice is made to go to more of a stable shot, it is used to add in fun whips and pans to accentuate the comedy of the scenes.
The best examples of experimental choices are however done in the reframing of shots with changes of characters to capture the new mindset of the characters. The constant cuts of ridiculous imagery to splice through moments as they pop up in characters’ heads elicit laughs while providing a very real insight into what characters are thinking. In the same vein as the illustration of anxiety in the first point, it furthers that by putting intrusive thoughts on screen for you to accompany the characters having them.
I can’t really get into the best examples of the experimentation without spoiling the reveal, so I’ll let you experience them for yourself.
Point 4: Pemberton Does It Again
Daniel Pemberton has been on my radar since 2018 with his work on Ocean’s 8 and more significantly, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He has since been involved in a plethora of major film, TV, and video game projects.
This year however seems to be a high bar for him with Project Hail Mary. That said, this much more muted endeavour is very impressive to me. It is much more minimalistic compared to a sci-fi blockbuster, but the precision is fine-tuned to complement the intermingling of anxiety and comedy, and finding the right timing for the musical cues to really mirror the audience’s emotional journey. And much like his previous work, he nails it.
Music in films such as these is often overlooked, but can sometimes ruin the experience if not in tune with what the movie is going for. You are unlikely to notice it too much, but it does exactly what it needs to.
I will admit that I do not think this will be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think it’s a breezy 100 minute journey that’s worth your time just to see how it makes you feel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets buried in a couple of months as a blip, but I think it’s worth a watch. If you can bring yourself to go to a theater, make sure it’s got a fair amount of people so you can laugh and cringe along. I very much enjoyed it and it could be one of those sneaky movies that makes it onto my top 10 of the year by the end of the year just because of the swings it takes despite being a small scale film.
