{"id":374572,"date":"2026-03-31T11:44:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/374572\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T11:44:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:44:07","slug":"pattinson-zendaya-in-half-funny-squirm-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/374572\/","title":{"rendered":"Pattinson, Zendaya in Half-Funny Squirm Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cThe Drama<\/a>,\u201d a squirm comedy that\u2019s supposed to hinge on the ultimate case of marital jitters, Robert Pattinson<\/a> gives one of the twitchiest performances in the history of twitchy performances. Oh sure, Dennis Hopper was twitchier in \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d \u2014 and so was Nicolas Cage spasming and blowing fuses in \u201cVampire\u2019s Kiss.\u201d But here\u2019s the thing: Pattinson is supposed to be playing a normal person.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s Charlie, a British yuppie museum curator who is about to be married, and who will soon be given good reason to walk around in a state of nervous wreckage. Yet Pattinson, sallow and moody, hair hanging in his face, peering through glasses with antic gloom, is twitchy from the very first scene \u2014 a meet-cute set (where else?) at an upscale coffee bar. Charlie is pretending to have read the novel that Emma (Zendaya<\/a>), seated at the window counter, is immersed in. That\u2019s a ruse you could imagine seeing in an old Hugh Grant movie, but Pattinson invests it with stalker energy. You want to tell the character, \u201cIf you\u2019re going to leap this far into deception to meet a girl, at least relax about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tCharlie isn\u2019t the only one twitching; the whole movie is. The writer-director, Kristoffer Borgli, who made the very good body-horror-meets-media-narcissism satire \u201cSick of Myself,\u201d<\/a> as well as the very weird Nicolas Cage comedy \u201cDream Scenario,\u201d shoots that meet-cute as if he were doing a remake of Godard\u2019s \u201cBreathless.\u201d It\u2019s all staged with hyper-realistic lighting and enough jump-cuts to suggest that something momentous is going on. Borgli is a gifted filmmaker, but in \u201cThe Drama\u201d he never stops jumping around \u2014 back in time, and also within scenes, all to hook us into a note of toxic anxiety. He succeeds, but the mix of tones is unnerving and, at times, a bit baffling. Are we supposed to be cracking up, or sucking in our breath as the hero\u2019s sanity cracks?<\/p>\n

\n\tCharlie and Emma become a couple, their relationship captured in flash-cut montages (hot sex, laughing, lolling about). The film then leaps ahead to their wedding. A week before the big event, they\u2019re testing out wedding-menu choices at the reception locale (they settle on the mushroom risotto), drinking too much pink wine at the solitary table where they\u2019re seated along with Charlie\u2019s best man, the gregarious Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Mike\u2019s wife, the spiky Rachel (Alana Haim), who\u2019s the maid of honor. The four start to play a game: What\u2019s the worst thing you\u2019ve ever done? One of them comes up with a doozy: Rachel once found herself in a cabin in the woods with a mentally impaired boy, and he was so annoying she locked him in the cabin closet and left him there. Screaming. As worst things you\u2019ve ever done go, that\u2019s pretty bad. (That Rachel is still self-righteous about it makes it worse.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut then Emma speaks up, and what she has to say floors everyone (and not in a good way). Emma, as Zendaya plays her, comes off as a happy camper \u2014 the soul of eager, smiling, well-adjusted relatability. To Charlie (and us), she seems a total catch. But guess what? At the table, Emma confesses that when she was 15, shy and isolated, in the throes of being bullied at school, she nearly committed a school shooting. She had the gun (her father\u2019s shotgun), the plan of action, and the desire. She was gonna do it! (She practiced with the shotgun, which caused her to become deaf in one ear.) Circumstances intervened, however, and she didn\u2019t. But as soon as she tells this story, everyone at the table is shell-shocked. Especially Charlie. They were playing a mischievous parlor game, and suddenly he\u2019s gripped by the fear that he\u2019s about to marry a psychopath.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the concept of \u201cThe Drama,\u201d and from the start it\u2019s at once prickly, amusing, and not entirely convincing. Simple question: How does one almost commit a school shooting? I get that the film is putting this forth as an edgy comic device. But even as \u201cThe Drama\u201d flashes back to Emma\u2019s adolescence, where she\u2019s played by Jordyn Curet, who makes her convincingly unhappy and traumatized, what we see is a lonely teenager, feeding on Internet memes (and real-life events), getting the fantasy in her head that maybe, just maybe, she has it within her to commit a horrifying crime.<\/p>\n

\n\tI can imagine a teenager today feeling that way. But that\u2019s not the same as saying \u201cshe almost did it,\u201d which, to be honest, is kind of a dumb idea. I didn\u2019t buy it \u2014 and it wouldn\u2019t be necessary to buy it if the movie simply showed us that Charlie, freaked out by this revelation from his fianc\u00e9\u2019s past, was triggered into having a neurotic unraveling. That is what happens, but the film also wants to say that\u2026she really almost did it. Given the holistic radiance of the Emma we see before us (not to mention the fact that female shooters are extremely rare), that seems an unduly thin conceit.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, the deadpan satirical mechanism of \u201cThe Drama\u201d is that Charlie gradually is going to fall apart. And Pattinson is certainly accomplished at moving from twitchy to twitchier, playing the whole thing as a compulsively rational dialogue with himself. Does Charlie now truly want to marry Emma? Are his fears justified? Or is what he\u2019s experiencing a hyperbolic version of the wedding anxiety \u2014 the wedding drama \u2014 that\u2019s\u00a0ordinary because on some level it\u2019s primal?<\/p>\n

\n\tI sound like I\u2019m doing that foolhardy thing of nitpicking the \u201cplausibility\u201d of a black comedy. But when a comedy is made in as clinical a psychodramatic mode as \u201cThe Drama\u201d is (Borgli, who\u2019s from Norway, directs with Scandinavian v\u00e9rit\u00e9), our belief in what\u2019s going on anchors the joke. That said, Borgli is a prankishly provocative filmmaker (\u201cSick of Myself\u201d was about someone mutilating herself to get attention; it also referenced a school shooting), and the way he gradually ups the cringe-comedy factor in \u201cThe Drama\u201d keeps us watching. Some of the movie is an acid satire of pre-wedding rituals \u2014 like the first dance that Charlie and Emma are dutifully rehearsing for, with a ridiculously stern taskmaster of a coach. Unsettling things happen (like Emma overseeing their DJ smoking heroin in the street), there\u2019s a lot of angst expressed in onscreen vomiting, and there is even a running ethical debate: Is almost committing a mass shooting worse than actually locking a kid in a closet?<\/p>\n

\n\tZendaya is in full charisma here, though I wish her character were written with more of a hint of a present-tense dark side. She\u2019s essentially playing the straight woman, and it\u2019s Pattinson\u2019s Charlie, losing his shit, who\u2019s the front-and-center stooge. But his performance comes into focus as the movie goes on, since it gives him more and more reason to fall apart. We realize how off the deep end he is when he makes an aggressive pass at his museum assistant, Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), which helps set up the culminating farce of the wedding sequence \u2014 which, after all the film\u2019s dithering and contrivance, turns out to be a climax that delivers. You\u2019ve got to say this much for Kristoffer Borgli: In \u201cThe Drama\u201d he\u2019s an original, like the bastard stepchild of Dogme 95 and \u201cWedding Crashers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cThe Drama,\u201d a squirm comedy that\u2019s supposed to hinge on the ultimate case of marital jitters, Robert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270,16180,55704,15117],"class_list":{"0":"post-374572","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-robert-pattinson","13":"tag-the-drama","14":"tag-zendaya"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}