‘The Drama’ review: Jittery comedy can't face up to its dark secret

Long before The Drama unveils its central conflict, the filmmaking clues us in on where we're headed. Kristoffer Borgli’s film opens with a Hitchcockian closeup of Zendaya’s ear. The camera stalks and skulks. The ambient sound fades in and out. Robert Pattinson spies, stammers, lies. It’s a meet-cute, but the tone is just shy of psychological horror.

With days to go for their wedding, Charlie (Pattinson) and Emma take their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) to dinner. Several drinks in, they stumble into a truth game: each person will tell the group the worst thing they’ve ever done. Charlie’s and Mike’s confessions are fairly innocuous; Rachel’s is more shocking (locking a developmentally challenged child in a shed overnight). All the while, Emma looks distinctly uncomfortable. But she’s too drunk to lie, and admits that, when she was 15, she’d planned a school shooting, opting out only at the last moment.

It’s a provocative hook for a comedy, and to Borgli’s credit, he doesn’t just drop the bombshell and move on. Like a Larry David sketch, everything in the couple’s life, from sex to everyday conversation, becomes about the aborted massacre. Charlie, a high-strung type at the best of times, finds it hard to wrap his head around the revelation. Emma visibly shrinks, forced to reckon with a guilt she’s buried for a decade and a half.

Should she feel that bad? Is, say, Rachel’s spontaneous act of (possibly unthinking) cruelty any better than aborted planned killings? Early in the film, Emma and Charlie see their wedding DJ on a street corner, smoking heroin. Emma insists they fire her. Charlie goes along somewhat reluctantly, asking his fiancée whether they might have caught her at the lowest point of her life. This, in a nutshell, is the moral conundrum of The Drama: should we judge people by their worst behaviour and, if we do, what are the chances of a totally honest connection with anyone?

Borgli, also the film's writer, is interested in how and when we opt for planning or impulse. During the opening credits, we see Emma and Charlie’s wedding dance being workshopped. Emma tries to suggest junking it for something more spontaneous, but Charlie insists on the choreography. One could read into this Emma’s repudiation of her near-disastrous adolescent tryst with planning, just as her harsh treatment of the DJ might stem from a desire to surround herself with steady and safe—job at a bookstore, arty friends, buttoned-down museum director fiancée.

There’s a stray reference to Lacombe, Lucien, a 1974 film by Louis Malle about a young member of the French Resistance who ends up working for the Nazis. Charlie jokingly says this is Emma, but in reverse, going from potential shooter to anti-gun activist. But The Drama doesn’t have the bite of Malle’s film because it can’t really imagine its protagonist as a killer, or get inside 15-year-old Emma's head. The bullying that drives her to violent fantasies of retribution is standard high school meanness. The flashbacks of her planning the shooting are all comically inept. Her confession about being seduced by the ‘aesthetic’ of other mass shooters is just confusing. Her conversion to normal life is a simple flick of the switch.

You’d assume there’s a reason two mixed-race couples are at the centre of this story. It’s true that the white characters react worst to Emma’s secret, with Rachel in particular revulsed by it. But the film barely touches on the racial implications of having a black woman as a mass shooter. The tacit suggestion seems to be that these differences stop mattering when you’re in a high enough stratum of society. There’s nothing racially charged about the comic-nightmare image of Emma cradling a gun—it’s simply a rich woman with a gun.

Zendaya is an fiesty protagonist in two other films about fraying relationships, the sublimely horny Challengers and the overheated Malcolm & Marie. In The Drama, she takes a backseat, Emma’s admission leaving character and actor on the defensive for the whole film. Pattinson is the more manic presence, the actor visibly keen to throw himself into a comic performance (he was very funny in The Lighthouse and Mickey 17 as well). He offers an appropriately A24-ish variant on that romantic comedy staple, the stammering Brit, charm replaced by panic and self-doubt.

Despite the thinness of its provocations, The Drama is jittery, messy fun, especially in its first half. Borgli runs out of ideas in the final stretch, which culminates in a chaotic, unrevealing train wreck of a wedding. The last scene reminded me of the calm-after-the-storm ending of Before Midnight, a film that understands there’s nothing scarier than a couple that’s decided to be brutally honest with each other.