Review: The Drama (2026)

The Drama (2026)

Rated R for sexual content, some violent/bloody images, language throughout, and brief drug use

Score: 5 out of 5

The Drama is a movie designed to shock. The trailer only hints at some of the very dark humor within it, promising the A24-indie take on a romantic comedy (not unlike last year's Materialists) about a young couple's trials and tribulations before their wedding, but what writer/director Kristoffer Borgli actually delivered here is a story about a lack of trust in a relationship, people who claim to be supportive but are in fact simply jerks, and the importance of being able to forgive people and accept that they can change, all of it anchored by two great performances by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as the lovebirds Charlie and Emma. I've seen this called an "anti-romantic comedy" by some critics, a movie where the protagonist's goal isn't to get the girl or even to keep her but force himself to answer the question of whether or not he still loves her at all after a sudden revelation about her past just a week before their big day throws everything he thought he knew about her up in the air. The marketing doesn't spoil what it is that she did, and even though we find out in the first twenty minutes, neither will I, partly because the exact details aren't that important to this movie's broader themes but also because the shock of it is important to this movie's humor, and I really hate spoiling the jokes in good comedies. Seriously, there were scenes in this movie that had me laughing harder than I'd laughed during a movie in years, often the sort of humor where you can't help but feel that you shouldn't be laughing but you are anyway because this film successfully walks such a tightrope in tackling really dark subjects without becoming just flat-out offensive.

And yet, the humor is only one part of this movie, which has continued to stick with me not just for the times I laughed my ass off but also for what it has to say about how we treat each other. Emma did (or at least tried to do) something fucked up in her youth, that much is certain. What's more, that experience and her ultimate reaction to it directly led her to grow up into the smart, lovely young lady she is now, preparing to walk down the aisle with Charlie... and yet, once Charlie and his friends find out about it while having some drinks and telling each other the worst things they ever did, it becomes hard for any of them to look at her the same. Rachel, a longtime friend of Emma's who is to be the maid of honor at her wedding, is so utterly horrified that she becomes the closest thing this film has to a villain, constantly antagonizing Emma and Charlie over the revelation even though she herself did something similarly vile (and, depending on how you look at it, arguably even worse). Charlie spends his next several days unable to look at his fiancé or do seemingly innocuous things without being reminded of the horrible thing she did as a teenager. And Emma, the one with the deep, dark secret, finds herself increasingly isolated from the people she once called friends and lovers. The nature of Emma's secret touches upon some very hot-button issues that would make most people, especially the typical audience of an A24 film, unlikely to sympathize with her and more likely to see the situation through Rachel's eyes (and indeed, some of the criticisms I've seen of the twist have eerily echoed some of the things Rachel says in the movie), which is why I think it's appropriate that a character like her was presented this way. By making her great sin something that could easily turn viewers against her, and then showing how she not only moved past it but strove to escape the darkness that informed that period of her life and led her to do such a thing, we're forced into Charlie's shoes as he has to grapple with whether or not he can forgive Emma for something that she did when she was a very different person. It's a journey that asks a lot of uncomfortable questions of both its characters and the audience, one in which there are no easy answers and the protagonists have to learn how to deal with that.

This is an actors' movie, and Robert Pattinson gets the juiciest part as Charlie, the nerdy-yet-charming guy who self-consciously acts like the male lead of an indie rom-com only to find himself in a very different sort of movie. Pattinson has grown into one of the best and most versatile actors of his generation, and this movie is a perfect showcase for him, playing a guy who runs through a wide range of emotions on his way to the wedding as he has to deal with the utter shitstorm that it's become. I barely recognized Pattinson in the role of Charlie, he blended so easily into playing a guy who, out of nowhere, finds himself in a situation spiraling out of control as everything he though he knew about the woman he loves is challenged. (It was also cool to see him get to use his native English accent in a movie for once.) Zendaya, meanwhile, plays Emma as a character much closer to her usual wheelhouse of moody, snarky, but nevertheless heroic young women, but there's a reason that's become her type, and it's because she's great at it. In this case, she lends that type a bit of a dark edge after we learn her secret, as Charlie's emotions inform how Emma is suddenly reframed in his eyes as a woman who, beneath her sweet exterior, is capable of terrible things. The film's secret weapon, though, was Alana Haim playing Rachel as an utter asshole of a sort that many of us are all too familiar with, somebody who prides herself on her open-mindedness but turns into a judgmental, passive-aggressive, hypocritical jerk after she learns Emma's secret. The whole movie, you're cheering for Rachel to finally get knocked down a peg for how she mistreats Emma, with Haim, who's best known as a musician and had only a couple of acting roles before this, delivering one of the best non-actor performances I've seen in a while. Much like Lady Gaga before her, I can see her going places as an actress.

The Bottom Line

The Drama is a heavy movie with a lot on its mind that veers between gut-bustingly hilarious and something that might make you take a long look in the mirror, and manages to pull both those things off without suffering from whiplash. This is one of my favorite movies of 2026, and I expect it to still be high on my list by the end of the year.