Whether it’s fake self-harm for attention or the toxic narcissism exposed through the disorienting trials of accidental fame, the insatiable need for external validation—and the desperate, sweaty insecurity it reveals— generally fuels all the audacious dark comedies of Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli. The writer-director behind “Sick of Myself” and “Dream Scenario,” Borgli, in his latest film, the provocative and deeply uncomfortable A24 comedy “The Drama,” explores the final, most intimate frontier of that obsession: the validation of our darkest interiority.
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The setup looks deceptively familiar at first. Zendaya andRobert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a couple days away from their wedding. Borgli presents their relationship in memory fragments that resemble a meet-cute movie in reverse. The structure is simple—vacillating between the couple’s past and the uneasy present of wedding preparations—but that back-and-forth still gives the relationship a destabilized shape, asking the audience to clock who these two were in the halcyon days versus the more stressful, present-day backdrop of nuptial planning strain.
That faint instability gives way to a rupture during a wine-tasting session to finalize the wedding menu. Emma and Charlie are joined by friends and fellow married couple Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), and what begins as social lubrication becomes a soul-baring drinking game about the worst thing each person has done. Everyone shares something unflattering, but still within the range of human compromise: cheating, dishonesty, ugly mistakes. Then Emma reveals something far more chilling.
That revelation is best left unspoiled. It’s the hinge where the uneasy social comedy mutates into something more jagged. Borgli flirts with transgressive material here, a morally radioactive confession that sends the film into a more vicious comic register—disturbingly funny and discomforting, boldly daring the audience to laugh at the very thing that disgusts them.
Emma’s bombshell—a secret from her adolescence—is just a moment of drunken vulnerability where she believes she is in a safe enough space to let her guard down. The parallel horror of “The Drama” lies in the reflexive repulsion of her loved ones. They don’t offer empathy; they offer shock followed by harsh judgment.
So it’s here that the search for approval shifts from the public square to the marriage bed, asking whether a relationship can survive the disclosure of an awful, premeditated thought that was never acted upon, but can never be unheard. Borgli puts their relationship under the microscope and suggests that in an age of radical transparency, the most dangerous validation we can seek is the pardon of being truly known.
Yet, the film’s most fascinating subversion is that this ugly admission doesn’t destroy Emma—it decimates Charlie instead. As the film vibeshifts into his manic anxiety, Pattinson delivers a hilariously committed performance of an insecure coward in an ego-driven crash-out. Like the viral victims in Borgli’s previous work, Charlie is less concerned with the morality of Emma’s past than with how her “monster” status reflects on him. Like “Dream Scenario,” which exposed Nic Cage’s character’s true nature—his thirsty need for recognition—this incident unveils the worst in Charlie. His dread unleashed, he begins viewing Emma not as a person in need of grace, but as a glitch in his curated life script. And he grows increasingly unhinged when he realizes he can no longer control the narrative. By the time the film reaches its wedding-day climax, Charlie has moved past making excuses for Emma and into a frantic, public attempt to save his own reputation—culminating in a spectacular, self-inflicted ruin before the audience he sought to impress.
Borgli is a sharp observer of culture war discourse, and there’s something of an online troll in the way he prods third rails. His films tend to poke at unwritten rules of decency, identity, and self-presentation, exposing how brittle our moral and social performances really are. “The Drama” turns the lens inward, toward the mental trespasses and private corruptions we hide from the people who claim to know us best. Borgli also weaponizes a relatable anxiety by turning what should be a couple’s perfect-day fantasy into a brutally caustic nightmare—the kind of Molotov cocktail he seems to delight in tossing into the room.
The film’s most delicious tension becomes a kind of multi-tiered stress test: whether Charlie can take Emma’s confession without coming apart, whether Rachel and Mike can continue their friendship with the couple after hearing it, and whether the audience can tolerate either the characters or the film’s willingness to sit in that unease. But what makes Borgli interesting is that he doesn’t just ragebait—he forces everyone in the room to examine the threshold of what they can excuse, forgive, or rationalize.
More complex than just cringe comedy, the movie knows exactly how to make a room squirm. The audience is meant to writhe, and the experience will definitely feel too punishing for some. But for anyone with a high tolerance for embarrassing social nightmares and emotional sadism, Borgli extracts real big LOLs from the slow, steady erosion of composure.
As the supporting cast—led by a sharply intuitive Haim—scrambles to regain their footing in the wake of the fallout, the film hits its peak as a relationship autopsy. Borgli proves once again that romance and humiliation are separated by only the thinnest membrane. He forces us to sit in that awkward space where narcissism and social performance bleed into one another, turning the polished, emotionally managed tropes of the modern rom-com inside out.
Yet for all its sharp-edged brilliance, “The Drama” struggles to stick the landing. As the story moves into its final stretch, the unsettling charms begin to dissipate, and a film built on such a wicked premise starts to loosen when it should bear down. What begins as an A-level anti-rom-com settles into something blurrier and less pointed by the end, with a nearly anti-climactic finish. It’s a little disappointing, and deflating, but it’s certainly not ruinous.
Even so, “The Drama” remains a vital, bleak, and admirably mean-spirited look at the cost of being known and, more expensively, the price of trying to save face. It doesn’t fully cash in on the nastiness of its best idea, but it is funny, queasy, and wholly willing to make everyone miserable for your amusement. In an era of soft, therapeutic romantic storytelling, that alone gives it biting validation. [B]
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
