Many movies are based on the drama that can arise from a wedding. But there’s drama and then there’s drama, and the drama in The Drama makes what happens in Bride Wars or Wedding Crashers or Bridesmaids or even Rachel Getting Married look like a bridal shower game.
Bride-to-be Emma (Zendaya) and groom Charlie (Robert Pattinson) meet cute in a coffee house. They’re ridiculously attractive young bougie urbanites; he’s an art museum curator and she’s a high-end bookseller. The relationship evolves into a passionate and loving engagement, and soon they’re finalizing first dance choreography and photographs and reception speeches.
Disaster strikes a week from the big day, when the two of them are on a wine-soaked double date with the best man (Mamoudou Athie) and the maid of honor (Alana Haim). The four wander into playing the never-advisable game of “tell us the worst thing you ever did.” All four confessions are bad enough, but one goes to the next level, instantly alienating the other three and throwing the wedding plans into turmoil. In the days that follow, we in the audience see more about what happened via convincing flashbacks. In the present, the characters flail around, unable to shake the revelations off, and matters spiral into betrayal and violence, some of it darkly comic but none of it farcical.
To give much more detail than this might be unfair; there could be value in being startled by the backstory, and the response to it. This is my principal uncertainty about the film: Would this disclosure be received with the vehemence it is here? I’m honestly not sure, nor can I confidently say to what degree class and generational differences might alter its reception.
These questions should lead to some lively post-movie discussions, at the least. I didn’t think, all things considered, that I would have reacted the way the characters here do. Some of their outrage seemed hypocritical and sanctimonious, even performative. But maybe this admission will call my own character into question.
In any case, as a piece of moviemaking craft The Drama is impressive. One of the characters compares the backstory to Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien, but The Drama is an original; a gripping depiction of the familiar dread that our worst moments may ultimately come to define us.
The acting, particularly of the restrained and subtle Zendaya, is superb. The young Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli shows a remarkably confident touch. He somehow sustains the polished romance and erotic glamour of the characters even as their lives are falling apart, and he raises the tension expertly, making the movie cringey and squirmy without making us – or me, at least – want to look away or flee the theater.
Borgli should also be commended for the ending. I was trying to imagine how this yarn could be wrapped up successfully – lurid melodrama? Ambiguity? But the final scene is emotionally and dramatically satisfying without patness; The Drama sticks the landing.
