Norwegian arthouse director Kristoffer Borgli’s latest American foray — starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a happily engaged couple whose forthcoming nuptials hit an unexpected snag — is best seen with as little prior knowledge as possible, in order to let its rollercoaster emotional twists catch you off guard.
In many ways it’s reminiscent of the kind of dramatic adult thriller Hollywood used to make in the 80s and 90s, in which a high-concept, often outlandish premise was guaranteed to set cultural wildfires —and often, as is the case here, featured two irresistible stars at the top of their game.
The story begins with a meet-cute in a Boston café, one that’s immediately stacked with layers of deceit. Charlie (Pattinson) clocks Emma (Zendaya) alone reading a book and quickly Googles it to chat her up, only to realise she can’t hear him because she’s deaf in one ear. She suggests he try again. Improbably, they hit it off.
“You’re a weird little freak,” she tells him later. “A little British freak.”
The moment, seen in flashback, has become a touchpoint for the now-engaged couple, a pair of attractive, successful millennials — he’s the head curator at a prestigious museum — with an enviable Boston townhouse and a close circle of cool, urbane friends.
Everything’s picture-perfect until Emma, Charlie and their married besties Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) get a little drunk at the wedding wine sampling, and stumble into a game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) witness the fallout in Emma and Charlie’s relationship.
VVS Films
After some mildly embarrassing confessions, Emma drops a bit of teenage lore that leaves everyone reeling — and her secret, like an emotional depth charge, soon turns the movie on its head.
The revelation, which has already leaked online, involves a particularly loaded topic in US culture, and it’s sure to crack open a can of cultural worms in an era ravaged by rock-bottom media literacy.
In his buzzy Norwegian cult hit Sick of Myself Dream Scenario
The Drama is very much in line with his penchant for provocation, but here the film’s taboo revelation is less important than the reaction it inspires in the characters, whose paranoia and sense of righteousness — and even their unstable relationship with reality — are exposed across one unsettling, hilarious scene after another.
While Borgoli’s film at first comes on like a smug European caricature of North Americans, complete with easy-if-amusing satire of millennial romance and the wedding industrial complex, it gradually reveals a more complex hand.
He taps into our unhealthy obsession with personal branding, where one mistake — even a mind crime — can decimate a person’s social capital, and reveal the lack of empathy in those around us. Is redemption even possible when others have an image to maintain?
If Borgoli’s grasp of American culture — especially race — has its limits, then that’s also part of what makes the movie work. As Pattinson’s Charlie unravels, we’re also watching a very European misconception of the US implode, right down to images that fuse sex, race and violence in clichéd — some will say irresponsible — ways. It’s as though Borgoli is telling on himself as much as his character.
There’s a hallucinatory aspect to much of it — juiced by Borgoli’s flash-forward editing and Daniel Pemberton’s uneasy, 70s psycho-drama score — that captures a man in the midst of losing control, wracked with suspicion and doubt.
The Drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson with director Kristoffer Borgli (centre).
VVS Films
Talk about Zendaya taking care of her little white boys .
In a film that relishes wrong-footing expectations, both stars deliver shapeshifting performances that help push the material toward unusual places, spinning on a dime from jet-black comedy to moments of vicious emotional warfare.
Pattinson, in particular, has never been better, mining all his freaky little eccentricities — not to mention his reputation as acting’s most notorious fabulist — for a memorable dramatic turn, while Zendaya’s gift for cool, inscrutable ambiguity serves her character to perfection.
Charlie and Emma’s relationship in The Drama is free and easy … until it isn’t.
VVS Films
Where it all ends up isn’t for spoiling here; suffice to say it isn’t any place an audience might imagine. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is Borgoli’s unusually cheesy — and for him, oddly empathetic — ending; though whether or not it’s intended to be taken at face value is up for discussion.
It’s just one of the many pleasures of this layered, thorny, often unnerving film, which — if the Ingmar Bergman poster adorning Emma and Charlie’s living room wall weren’t enough of a clue — is as psychologically intense as it is comedic.
In other words, it’s a perfect date movie.
Don’t miss it — and whatever you do, don’t Google it.
The Drama is in cinemas on April 2.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand