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There is a particular kind of cinematic unease that doesn’t arrive with a jolt, but with a slow, tightening grip—the sense that what you’re watching is slipping, inch by inch, into something irreparable. The Drama, Kristoffer Borgli’s unnervingly assured follow-up to Sick of Myself, operates entirely within that tightening vice. It begins as something deceptively familiar—an off-kilter romantic comedy about a beautiful, seemingly well-matched couple preparing for their wedding—and then, with unnerving patience, reveals itself to be something far more corrosive, provocative, and, at times, perversely funny.
Borgli has always been interested in discomfort as both subject and form, but here he refines that interest into something almost punishingly precise. The film is structured like an emotional demolition: each scene chips away at the audience’s expectations until the entire foundation collapses under the weight of a secret so destabilizing it reconfigures everything that came before it. To say more about that secret would be to rob the film of its most potent mechanism. What matters is not merely the revelation itself, but the moral aftershocks it produces—how it forces both the characters and the audience into an uneasy negotiation with empathy.
At the center of this storm are Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, whose pairing proves as inspired as it is volatile. Zendaya, in what may be the most expansive performance of her career, subverts her own screen persona with startling confidence. There is a delicacy to her work here—a vulnerability that initially reads as familiar—that gradually curdles into something far more ambiguous and unsettling. She doesn’t simply reveal layers; she weaponizes them, allowing the audience to feel both protective of and repelled by her in equal measure. It is a performance built on contradictions, and she navigates them with remarkable control.
Pattinson, meanwhile, continues his fascination with men on the brink of psychological collapse. His fiancé is twitchy, earnest, and faintly absurd—a man whose neurotic tendencies initially register as comic texture but soon become something more desperate. Pattinson plays him like a live wire, oscillating between swooning devotion and barely contained panic. There is a squirrelly awkwardness to his physicality that Borgli exploits to brilliant effect, particularly in moments where humor and horror bleed into one another. Together, he and Zendaya generate a chemistry that feels less like a romantic ideal and more like a high-stakes experiment: unpredictable, combustible, and impossible to look away from.
What distinguishes The Drama from other recent entries in the dark romantic comedy canon is its refusal to provide the audience with moral refuge. Borgli is not interested in easy judgments or tidy resolutions. Instead, he constructs a narrative that continually implicates the viewer, asking uncomfortable questions about the limits of compassion. How far can empathy stretch before it snaps? What do we owe to the people we love when they reveal themselves to be capable of the unthinkable? And, perhaps most disturbingly, what does it say about us if we find ourselves still wanting to understand them?
These questions are embedded not just in the screenplay, but in the film’s formal design. The editing, in particular, deserves special mention. Borgli and his collaborators shape the film’s rhythm with an almost sadistic precision, allowing scenes to linger just long enough to become unbearable before cutting away—or, more cruelly, before pushing even further. The effect is cumulative. Like a car crash that keeps unfolding in slow motion, each new development compounds the last, creating a sense of dread that becomes increasingly difficult to shake.
Visually, the film is deceptively elegant. The cinematography leans into the polished aesthetics of contemporary romantic dramas—sunlit interiors, carefully composed frames—only to gradually destabilize them as the narrative darkens. By the time the film reaches its most intense passages, that initial beauty has taken on a sickly quality, as though the images themselves are complicit in the unraveling. This tension between surface and substance mirrors the central relationship, which begins in apparent harmony before revealing the fractures beneath.
Daniel Pemberton’s score plays a crucial role in maintaining this delicate balance. Alternating between whimsical motifs and more ominous undercurrents, the music acts as both a guide and a misdirection, luring the audience into a false sense of security before pulling the rug out from under them. It is, like the film itself, both inviting and deeply unsettling.
There is, of course, humor here—often outrageous, frequently cringe-inducing, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Borgli has a gift for finding comedy in the most inappropriate places, and The Drama is no exception. But these laughs are never purely escapist. They catch in the throat, arriving at moments when laughter feels almost like a betrayal. The film understands that humor and horror are not opposites, but close relatives, each capable of intensifying the other.
If the film has a flaw, it lies in its very ambition. There are moments when Borgli’s determination to provoke threatens to overwhelm the emotional core of the story, pushing the narrative into territory that risks alienating as much as it engages. Some viewers may find the film’s central conceit too extreme, its tonal shifts too destabilizing. But even these moments feel, in a strange way, consistent with the film’s ethos. The Drama is not designed to comfort; it is designed to unsettle, to provoke, to linger.
In that sense, it succeeds brilliantly. Long after the credits roll, the film continues to gnaw at the edges of the mind, its questions unresolved, its images difficult to shake. It is a conversation-starter in the truest sense—not because it offers easy answers, but because it refuses them.
What ultimately makes The Drama so compelling is its understanding that love, in its most extreme forms, can be both a source of profound connection and a conduit for profound denial. Borgli does not romanticize this tension; he exposes it, dissects it, and, at times, seems almost horrified by it. Yet there is also a strange, disarming sincerity at the heart of the film—a belief that even in the darkest corners of human behavior, there is something worth examining, if not entirely understanding.
In an era where romantic narratives often default to either cynicism or sentimentality, The Drama charts a far more dangerous path. It asks us to sit with discomfort, to resist the urge to look away, and to confront the unsettling possibility that empathy is not always a virtue, but a risk.
It is, in every sense, a film that earns its title.
