‘The Drama’ Uses Vomit in Place of Emotion, That’s Just the Start

The Drama, the new and justifiably controversial new film from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, wants to be a darkly satirical inversion of the classic romantic comedy formula. But in its attempts to subvert norms, it just ends up feeling grim, shallow, and unpleasant, and its main plot point is so tone-deaf that it blots out the sun of anything else that the film is trying to do. The mating habits of entitled urban millennials is a rich vein to mine. In an attempt to make his satire socially relevant, Borgli ends up pitching a ball straight into the gutter.

The Drama★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Kristoffer Borgli
Written by: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Alana Haim, Mamoudou Athie
Running time: 105 mins

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, top movie-star draft picks, play a couple on the verge of their wedding. In the first of The Drama’s many annoying flashbacks, we see their meet-cute at a Boston coffeehouse. Charlie Thompson (Pattinson) tries to chat up Emma Harwood (Zendaya) about a book she’s reading, even though he hasn’t read it himself, but he doesn’t know that she can’t hear out of one ear and has an AirPod in the other. That sets the stage for the most tone-deaf film of the season.

Fifteen minutes in, the plot drops like an anvil on Wile E. Coyote’s head. Pattinson and Zendaya and their annoying best friends, while sampling wedding wines, play a deadly game of Never Have I Ever, where they reveal the “worst thing” they’ve ever done. Zendaya’s worst thing, even though it didn’t actually end up harming anyone, is so morally incomprehensible to the others that it sends them spiraling into insanity and threatens to destroy everyone’s lives.

From there, the worst thing — which you’ve probably seen mentioned elsewhere at this point but I won’t mention here — takes over the entire film. We see flashbacks to Zendaya’s childhood, where a teenage actor, who isn’t Zendaya but vaguely resembles her, goes through the motions of the worst thing. Worse than that, however, are reveries where Thompson imagines himself (as Pattinson) having romantic moments with the teenage Zendaya, meaning there are scenes of 39-year-old Pattison cuddling a 14-year-old girl overlooking Boston Harbor or some such thing, which is quite cringey, very Euro.

Borgli’s script, while superficially edgy, is actually quite shallow. Pattinson is apparently the chief curator of the non-existent “Cambridge Museum Of Art,” and Zendaya works at some sort of hoity-toity bookstore. But they never talk about art, or books, even though there are lots of both in the set design. They also don’t talk about movies, or TV, or politics, or sports, or things they see on the internet, or anything, really. These are people without discernible interests or passion. They live in a fairly luxurious townhome and are constantly eating at what appear to be expensive restaurants. Other than one fleeting shot of some disgusted kitchen help, Borgli just takes this for granted and never comments on the absurd class posturing of people who, by all rights, should be struggling to pay rent, not guzzling rosé.

The characters are thin and witless. Rather than having them express their emotions, Borgli chooses instead to have them vomit. Zendaya vomits twice within a five-minute span. Pattison vomits about 45 minutes later. When they’re not vomiting, they’re bleeding. All of this takes place with Boston as a backdrop. It doesn’t resemble the cinematic Boston of films past. Even Fever Pitch felt more authentically Boston than The Drama.

It wouldn’t be fair to The Drama to compare it to Boston films like The Friends of Eddie Coyle or The Departed, which, after all, were movies about people committing actual crimes as opposed to The Drama’s thought crimes. But a 1977 indie called Between The Lines, about the waning days of a Back Bay alternative newsweekly, did keep coming to mind. That movie features young artistic-type people negotiating the pressures of romantic commitment and permanent adulthood. But these are also people who care about things, their community, the future, their art, and one another. They feel like actual people living actual lives, as opposed to movie-star cardboard cutouts. No one in The Drama cares about anything or anyone but themselves and that’s why we don’t care about their drama.