Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that?

THE DRAMA

2026

Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

Spoilers: would be a complete waste of time at anything lower than "high," so high

The Drama made a moderate-sized splash during its release back in the spring—it's not the most challenging bar for a movie to clear, but I'll give it its due, it's one of 2026's highest-grossing "movies for grown-ups," as the saying goes—and if it got there by a combination of its promise of a provocation and the chickenshitness of its execution, well, at least you can very easily summarize its hook: "what if on the eve of your wedding, you (Zendaya) foolishly accepted a dare to reveal your darkest secret, the worst thing you've ever done, and what if it was pretty bad, but more to the point what if it shocked the consciences of your acquaintances (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) and took your relationship with your fiancé (Robert Pattinson) to its breaking point?"

Obviously it would depend on what the movie does with this, and I think A24 knew what it didn't do with it, given that it cagily hid what The Drama's "worst thing" was, probably helping drive some fraction of that box office.  But I've kind of already told you what it does with it, without so much as using the characters' names, which I frankly did not manage to keep a solid grasp on until it was almost two-thirds over,* and then mainly because there are two scenes in a row where someone is repeatedly using Pattinson's character's name (it's "Charlie") as the punctuation marks in a series of hostile statements (I'd also forgotten his occupation even though the movie had made a modestly big deal out of that, though his is the only character who has a describable "job"); and partly that is because I was having trouble paying attention to this simultaneously boring and obnoxious movie, but some of it is because it really is that foggy and fill-in-the-blank, which I guess shouldn't come as some extraordinary surprise from a movie literally just called The fucking Drama.  But it'd be rude not to at least treat with The Drama with as much concreteness as it provides, which of course boasts some measure of detail across its 105 plodding, unmodulated minutes, but is basically just what that "worst thing" was.  So: Emma and Charlie are yuppies in New York (he's a British-American immigrant, purely so Pattinson can use his own voice for once) and they're getting married, and during a dinner with their maid of honor and best man respectively, the already-married couple Rachel and Mike, they are inveigled into a game of declaring their gravest sin.  Rachel's is legitimately horrifying, but I'd like to circle back to that; Mike's is a bit rotten but born more of weakness than malice; it feels like they straight-up forgot to include Charlie's at all until the day this scene was shot, and it turns out that, in some nebulous manner, he "cyberbullied" "somebody" in "high school"—for, importantly, the majority of these incidents happened in their teens, even early teens (and yes, between Pattinson, the dialogue, and the props in the flashbacks, the movie doesn't seem to have the firmest grasp on how old anybody is now, though Emma is presumably 29 or 30).  When the onus falls upon Emma, she tells the truth: when she was 14 she got extremely close to shooting up her school.

I'll give The Drama this, it isn't as chickenshit as it could be and as it is sometimes described, because it wasn't just idle daydreaming on Emma's part, but, in legalese, substantial steps, up to and including bringing her dad's rifle to school, and by her own admission the main reason she stepped back was that, on the very day she'd decided to rain vengeance down on her bullies, another mass shooting happened in her town, and instead of realizing that this was ideal for her purposes, because now law enforcement assets would be tied up with the other threat, it instead merely stole her thunder, and in the aftermath, she became the sole person in history to have her personality transformed by the top-down group therapy they give to kids in the aftermaths of adjacent tragedies that didn't actually affect them into not only forgiving her tormentors but becoming a fiery anti-gun activist.  Well, in the present, it hasn't aged into a funny story, Rachel being especially outraged under the theory that her cousin was paralyzed in a mass shooting, though the anguish falls predominantly on Charlie who crumples under the triple pressures of potential social opprobrium, pangs of physical danger, and the realization that his fiancee is a vastly more complicated person than he had previously believed.

But it is, still, kind of chickenshit: Emma ultimately didn't do anything, after all, or at least what she did went unknown so, in a social sense, it didn't even happen; arguably the worst thing she ever did was, in her new anti-gun zeal, throwing her dad's ~$1000 rifle into the Goddamn swamp.  (Meanwhile, she also partially deafened herself training with the rifle in a way that the movie makes hard to physically parse how exactly it happened, with its recoil rather than its report.)  So, extremely hypothetically, the movie opens up this philosophical debate about what constitutes an evil act, and because this conversation is almost entirely hypothetical it sort of feels more like the movie has made a chalkboard full of cold calculations about what's triggering, but not too triggering, and how close they can get to having Emma do something actually bad, without turning the majority of the audience against her or starting a truly charged debate, though the movie shows its hand, to a surprising degree and long before its denouement, as to what it thinks the appropriate treatment of this long-ago event is.  (It has fully two of its moron characters suggest "calling the cops.")

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli seems to have some preoccupation with the associated concepts of thoughtcrime and accountability as they manifest in our 21st century; at least I get the impression that's what his previous film Dream Scenario is partly about, apparently in an increasingly literal fashion (I can't say I'd be enthusiastic about catching up with it now).  And, here in The Drama, he's crafted what I guess amounts to a private cancellation (for one of the oddest things about the movie, that also sort of ensures it spins its wheels through its second half, is that the secret remains pretty close to entirely contained, for all intents and purposes shared only amongst our central quartet, and the movie despises Rachel so much it can't even give her any credit for not posting it)—via a situation that I think would stand a much better chance of working if they were, say, all young people in college, rather than this happening with middle age breathing down some of their necks—and it's stacked the deck in several ways to nudge you towards the pro-thoughtcrime, anti-accountability position, not usually very fairly, probably starting with the particular dimensions of this inchoate school shooting (it's apolitical; it's born of pain; and I don't think it's worth entirely overlooking the unconscious bias Borgli's hoped to take advantage of with Emma's femininity, even if they do mention the "I Don't Like Mondays" girl as a gender trailblazer**).

But mainly it's the film's go-to move of liberal-coded hypocrisy, kicking off, as I recall, with Emma and Charlie's accidental discovery that their wedding DJ is a heroin user—which is one astonishing thing, I'd think, to give a shit about, even for the types they represent; but give a shit they affirmatively do, Charlie in particular—but allow me to correct myself, it kicks off with Mike's PR-like optics editing of Charlie's recollections of his first encounter with Emma for his wedding speech, in which this INCEL MANOSPHERE LOSER (or whatever) ginned up a lie about the book Emma was reading in order to broach a conversation, which, more concerningly still, since he takes a photo for extra surveilling creepiness, indicates that he can't memorize the title of a book he's looking directly at, even when it's one word, like The Drama.  This continues through basically the remainder of the runtime, few scenes passing without a reminder of the hypocrisy (and the dumbness), with a number of scenes even finding characters contradicting statements they'd made minutes earlier in that scene, also without being checked in any way.  And that starts to get us into what's really wrong with The Drama, but I should mention the big hypocrisy, which is that Rachel's "worst thing" was locking some kid in a closet in an abandoned RV for a night, which unlike Charlie's transgression, really does feel unnervingly specific, but more to the point she wasn't even the one to have let the kid out, so if he'd died I think you'd have an easier time pinning a murder or manslaughter charge on her than any manner of attempted homicide on Emma.***  The movie, bafflingly, sort of treats this like it's "secretly worse" when it is blaringly, bludgeoningly worse—you'd need to look up the relevant statute of limitations, but it's not implausible that "call the cops" could get traction with Rachel—but regardless, it takes like another hour of screentime before anybody mentions this was notably fucked up and articulates any objection to her hectoring self-righteousness, when you have to judge her an especially low-functioning sociopath to even contemplate telling anybody this (let alone laughingly—let alone eagerly! she's the one who suggests the game!), while judging everyone around her astoundingly witless in order to let such an admission slide, at least when she's also invoking the moral high ground.  The other go-to move, anyway, is people stress-vomiting on tables and such; though, at a certain point, I had cause to wonder if an actual subtext of the movie was Charlie's battle with erectile dysfunction, for which his newfound anxiety is only an excuse.

So earlier I used the term "movie for adults," which is already begging the question a little but I think I can live with that; I could not have lived with "realist drama," which is to say a movie where human beings live human lives, when this movie concerns no such thing.  The figure getting the closest is Emma, because you can imagine she still is one, since, of his two principals, Borgli has attached by far the least actual story to her.  Nominally, this is a relationship two-hander between Emma and Charlie (and I have, indeed, begrudgingly called it "a romance," solely because the last seven minutes or so of it belong to a much better, more emotionally-involving movie than the one that played in front of them).  In practice, it's Charlie's psychodrama with Emma as its object, exiled so fully into a conceptual realm that you'll still notice even when the rest of the ensemble are only thinly-sketched concepts themselves.  (It doesn't hurt—or, maybe, doesn't help?—that after a lot of time spent in movies, roughly a couple of years back Zendaya finally evolved some measure of genuine screen presence and acting skill; twenty-plus years on, Pattinson is still looking for the former, and is still convinced that taking on sweaty, humiliating roles proves he has the latter.)

"Psychodrama" is Borgli's main entrypoint into directing the movie he wrote, and there are occasional flashes of visual interest, exclusively inside Charlie's fantasy sequences, which include a sequence rendering Zendaya as a Guns and Ammo pin-up, which isn't as fun as it probably should be and not as horrifying as it easily could be, and a slaughtered wedding party, which isn't as horrifying as it probably should be, and not as fun as it easily could be, at least given how unwaveringly unpleasant all of the named characters are here besides Emma, plus several unnamed characters also (I'm ambivalent on whether their replacement DJ would be any great loss to society).  More than phantasmogoria, though, Borgli has decided, with virtually the entire movie circumscribed by Charlie's perspective—not all of it, of course; don't imagine it's possibly that disciplined; and that we never get the slightest insight into Charlie's "cyberbullying" campaign arguably rises to the level of "characterization," but Jesus Christ, I think that goes to my overall thesis that this movie sucks—to get real fancy with his subjective editing.  In fact, he receives an editing credit of his own, alongside Joshua Raymond Lee, editing which I'd maybe respect more in a movie I liked, or vice versa, but it's some aggravating fucking stuff, not really marking fantasies very hard, except to the extent they bear narratively-unlikely content (which I understand is a complete holdover from Dream Scenario), but also not marking flashbacks in any way whatsoever except to the extent they also bear narratively-unlikely content in the present tense, which is extremely hard to judge in a movie with these idiots.  Increasingly, he appears to be trying to pull some kind of outright Malick, gambling on some complicated intercuttings that are absolutely enervating and confusing, with these transitions that shift to entirely new locations hours or days later before the movie wrenches us directly back into scenes we had every right to believe were over, and Borgli is doing this with a whole lot less obvious emotional logic to the pyrotechnics than I assume he must have perceived; beyond, anyhow, "Charlie is having a nervous breakdown now."

That is the directing; Borgli the screenwriter, on the other hand, has managed, basically, an episode of a sitcom with no jokes.  (And I say "an episode" and not "four episodes" in reference to its narrative density, too.)  The precise premise is edgier than most sitcoms would be comfortable with, but that's it, it otherwise plays out within more-or-less the same parameters as "Chandler and Monica have a fight," except they'd be funnier or at least more comprehensible.  There are many incomprehensibilities here, dialogue contrived for the sake of some kind of wry irony and character actions contrived solely for plot and thematic parallelism, and when I said these are not humans, that's down to the wildly inconsistent reactions to the big stuff but it's just as salient in the small stuff, from a father giving a toast at his daughter's wedding that for no earthly reason besides the one he wouldn't be aware of (we're watching a movie "about" a would-be mass shooter) awkwardly flops its way into discussing Emma's "teenaged rebellion" against her father's pro-gun ways, to the coworker who is subjected to an almost violent thought experiment about what she'd do if her boyfriend revealed what Emma revealed to Charlie, resulting in Charlie weeping like a baby, the combination of which appears to get her wet.  Or how about Emma "humorously" walking all the way into their bedroom with a kitchen knife to offer food, that very normal thing real people do all the time.  I wouldn't call this comedic, and I wouldn't call the rest of the screenplay comedic, either, just an abrasive and tedious almost-two-hours with cartoons that could probably support comedy but are always presented with such blunt 70s marriage story dourness (check my photography's many shades of grainy browwwwn) that even the paranoiac visual signifiers (check my zooooom) feel like they're asking to be taken as the bone-dry, dead-serious kind of satire within these irritating locations and this "preparing for a wedding" structure (check my obvious assumption that bourgeois urbanites represent societeeeee); the movie, which I have little doubt arrogates itself the status of "starting conversations," had the result in this household of sowing some discord, but mainly over what the fucking definition of "a joke" was.

Score: 3/10

*I mean, I got one of them persistently wrong for the entire initially-published draft of this review.

**There's a needledrop that would be infinitely improved if it were the Boomtown Rats song.

***As a matter of policy alone, significantly punishing mass shooters who voluntarily abandon their plots sounds like kind of a bad idea.