The Drama (2026)
dir. Kristoffer Borgli
Rated: R
image: ©2026 A24
Anyone who regularly reads this site knows that I typically do my best to avoid spoilers within a review. That would be a practically impossible goal for the movie under review this week. Please be warned that, if you haven’t already seen The Drama, here there be spoilers. Proceed with the appropriate amount of caution.
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What’s the absolute worst subject you could imagine using to try to make someone laugh? If you’ve seen the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats, you probably already have plenty of ideas. That film details the sordid and (up until the release of the movie) secret history of the joke that comedians tell amongst themselves in an attempt to one up each other in outrageousness.
If memory serves (it usually doesn’t), one subject that is never mentioned in The Aristocrats is school shootings. There’s not too much hilarity to be mined from the topic. Yet that’s the taboo subject inescapably infused into almost every second of The Drama, the new black comedy from Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli.
I didn’t know that Borgli’s movie was a comedy when I started watching it. I had avoided learning too much about The Drama before screening it – as is my habit with most movies – and the film’s trailer is frustratingly opaque when it comes to the plot. The shock beginning, which is revealed in the movie’s first act, is heavily alluded to in the trailer but is rendered incomprehensible in order to keep the mystery alive.
The Drama begins with a meet cute. Charlie, a Brit working in America, spots Emma in a coffee shop one day. He needs an ice breaker, so, when she gets up to retrieve her order, Charlie slyly takes note of the book that Emma is reading. After some quick Googling, he works up the nerve to walk over to chat her up.
After an awkward eternity of Charlie trying and failing to get Emma’s attention, he learns that she only has one earbud in because she is completely deaf in the other ear. The two go on a first date – during which Charlie initially attempts to double down on his affection for the book that brought them together before admitting that he hasn’t actually read it – and two years later, the couple are planning a wedding.
The two meet their best man and maid of honor, married couple Mike and Rachel, at a caterer’s shop to sample possibilities for the wedding reception. Charlie and Emma tell their close friends about seeing their wedding DJ smoking what appeared to be heroin on a city street. They wonder if they should fire the DJ to avoid a drug-addled mishap with the music.
During the tasting, in which the wine is flowing freely – to the consternation of the caterers – the conversation turns to bad decisions. The quartet decide to participate in a parlor game that Mike and Rachel indulged in before their own wedding. Each person must describe the worst thing that they have ever done, with a promise to never mention it again. Mike, who is perturbed that he is, in fact, having to mention the worst thing he has ever done for a second time, tells the group about once using an ex-girlfriend as a human shield during a dog attack while vacationing in Mexico.
Rachel admits to, when she was a teenager, locking her mentally disabled neighbor in the closet of an abandoned RV that he wanted to show her. She left him there overnight, but relates that he was found the next day and that she skated on any consequences for her cruelty. Charlie sheepishly confesses to cyberbullying a former classmate so severely that his parents moved the family out of town. He then admits that the move might have been coincidental, leaving the impression that his act of bullying wasn’t as extreme as he initially made it sound.
Emma offers her confession last. When she was fifteen, after merciless bullying from her fellow classmates, she planned and prepared to carry out a school shooting but backed out at the last minute when another shooting took place at a nearby shopping mall. Seeing how the shooting affected the other students – one of their classmates was killed – turned Emma into a gun control advocate. She gained recognition in her hometown for her activism and organizing on the issue.
The group of friends is shaken by Emma’s account, most of all Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed in a school shooting. The promise to never mention these peccadillos ever again is completely forgotten as Rachel initially refuses to participate in or attend Emma and Charlie’s wedding. Meanwhile, Charlie can’t stop imagining the fifteen-year-old version of his bride-to-be gearing up to commit a horrific act of violence.
With only four feature films under his belt, Borgli has already started to cultivate a reputation as a provocateur. The Norwegian’s 2022 sophomore effort, Sick of Myself, is a black comedy centering around a woman so jealous of her romantic partner’s rising sculpture career that she begins self-harming in order to attain the attention she believes she deserves.
His first English-language effort, 2023’s Dream Scenario, is an enjoyable surrealist comedy, but, if you squint just right, there are reactionary politics at the edge of the frame of his movie about cancel culture that punishes people – specifically Nic Cage, whose character in the movie starts appearing in other peoples’ dreams – who have done nothing wrong.
Borgli’s previous movie and this new one share that last bit of thematic concern. Emma’s confession turns her – and her fiancé’s – world upside down. It’s the catalyst at the root of every development in the story. Yet, Emma didn’t actually harm anyone and, until the night of her confession, no one had the first idea about what she had planned to do. She is essentially tried and convicted by everyone at the table that night of thought crimes.
Using the topic of school shootings to drive a comedy, even one as pitch-black as The Drama, is a fatal flaw from which the movie never recovers. I’m convinced that this particular subject matter given this treatment was only possible by a non-US filmmaker. The US is the only industrialized nation on the planet earth where mass-shootings regularly occur. Millions of words have been written about why it is that we are the only wealthy society in the world that must endure this insanity.
To Borgli, it’s all a joke. There’s even a laugh mined from Emma correcting Charlie on how many people have to be shot for an incident to be considered a mass-shooting. One tortured scene played for laughs near the middle of the movie has the betrothed couple’s photographer repeatedly use the word – she practically shouts it – “shoot” when referring to her duties on wedding day.
My wife let me know that social media recounted tales of audiences of The Drama uproariously laughing during the scene with the photographer. Maybe it was our audience that sabotaged my own reaction and befuddled me about how much I was expected to laugh. Our screening took place during the late afternoon, with twenty-or-so other people in the theater. There was certainly laughter throughout our screening of The Drama, but always sparingly enough that I could never get a handle on if we were supposed to be laughing.
There are also plot contrivances and lazy storytelling throughout The Drama that are hard to overlook. Charlie and Emma just happening upon their DJ smoking heroin on the streets of Boston – the incident that puts the plot in motion – feels very screenwriter-y. Emma conveniently overhears a conversation that, likewise, is crucial in setting off events late in the film.
The movie also suffers from using unbelievable life circumstances as a way to avoid money being an issue within the story. Charlie is a museum curator, a top position in the field, at Cambridge College – at the age of thirty. The character’s chosen field most likely served as the way to get a certain book into his hands midway through the film that further unmoors his emotional state.
It feels odd to note, considering the characters spend the majority of the movie disconnected emotionally from one another, but Robert Pattinson, as Charlie, and Zendaya, as Emma, have wonderful chemistry together throughout The Drama. I am of the opinion, like seemingly most of the rest of the world, that there’s nothing Zendaya can’t do when it comes to performing.
Alana Haim missteps as Emma’s maid of honor Rachel after wonderful turns for Paul Thomas Anderson in Licorice Pizza and One Battle after Another. Haim’s performance of the character is obvious; I never bought her righteous indignation routine, which comes off as one-note.
The Drama is essentially cringe-comedy using one of our nation’s most shameful and horrific attributes as the driver for the laughs. Even Michael Scott would find what Borgli is doing here to be distasteful. Despite Pattinson and Zendaya’s best efforts, they can’t rescue this ill-advised black comedy.
Why it got 2.5 stars:
- Despite the two leads sharing wonderful on-screen chemistry, The Drama can never rise above its ghoulish premise.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- All of the falderal surrounding the DJ seems to exist for a throwaway gag near the end of the movie concerning a different DJ. It’s a long way to go for not much of a payoff.
- Borgli, who shared editing duties on the movie with Joshua Raymond Lee, employs an abrupt cutting style that always keeps the audience off balance.
- I enjoyed the moments when Borgli used what sounds like air on a vinyl or cassette tape recording as a haunting counterpoint to what we’re seeing on the screen.
- Daniel Pemberton’s woodwind-heavy score is one of the most enjoyable things about The Drama.
- Gotta love it when filmmakers put words in their characters’ mouths about esoteric movies. Louis Malle’s 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien is mentioned, although not specifically by title, in The Drama. While it’s a little unbelievable that any of these characters would be familiar with it, I now have one more movie added to my watch list.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- As mentioned above, I saw this with Rae at a late-afternoon screening at Alamo Cedars. The Drama is currently available exclusively in theaters.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I’ve found a small bit of joy in the unending freak show that is our current presidential administration. It seems we’re fighting a new forever war, World War III could break out at any minute, and the leader of our nation has casually threatened genocide against an entire country, but I can’t stop laughing my ass off at all these MAGA evangelical Christians having to eat shit over Dear Leader sharing a blasphemous image of himself as AI Jesus. Enjoy worshiping Trump as your new lord and savior, you fucking hoopleheads.