The Drama: Finally, a Big Swing

Okay, it’s a modest swing. But Kristoffer Borgli’s new romantic tragicomedy The Drama (2026) actually tries something. Triumph all ye cherubim; sing with us, ye seraphim. It even manages to do topicality without saturating itself in the slime of present outrage. And it ain’t half bad to boot.

The Drama is about the drama of a specific couple, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya). Writer-director Borgli takes him time, however, as the beginning settles us into their love story. We’ve got him lying about reading a book to approach her in public; we see her wild playfulness, pants-ing him during a tirade about work. You can’t have drama without a little grounded romance. Shakespeare knew it. Howard Hawkes knew it. Jonathan Demme knew it. Apparently, it’s gotten around to the Norwegians now too.

But worry not, this Ari Aster-produced star vehicle does not shirk the drama. Charlie and Emma are to marry and abuse their food and wine testing privileges with the caterer. Good and sauced with a couple friends, they begin sharing the worst thing they’ve ever done. One friend says he did something bad to a dog—I was afraid. Who can stand a poor animal harmed in a movie? But no. He just used his hated girlfriend as a human shield against a feral dog (she was fine). Another locked a “slow” child into an abandoned trailer’s bathroom. He, however, survives. Charlie was a cyberbully. Each new confession brings renewed fear, then relative relief.

Until we get to Emma. She planned and nearly executed a school shooting. Putting aside the absurdity of the timeline (Emma is 30. She planned the shooting at 16. Assuming filming in 2025, school shootings weren’t yet quite so common in 2012, even though Emma says they were), this dumbfounds all present. One friend has a cousin put in a wheelchair by a school shooter.

So, we’ve found our motive force. Can Charlie trust her now? Can her friends forgive her? What if this neatly repressed secret gets out beyond the friend group? Here, I began to worry. Call me cynical or apathetic, but I have no desire to see Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in an “issues” movie. Years of cinematic moralizing and brainrot have made me especially sensitive to ruminating hunks.

Luckily, Borgli chose Jesus, so to speak. That is, he refuses to tarry with the shooting as such. The film becomes (imagine this) about their relationship, the nature of understanding, the (im)possibility of forgiveness, and the dogged hope for human development and change. We viewers are not asked to adjudicate if Emma is a monster. The characters barely are either.

Understandably, the film has come in for some criticism about humanizing school shooters. I say “understandably” because, as anyone who has spent too much time thinking about quote-unquote true crime can tell you, most mass-casualty perpetrators are uninteresting, not particularly worthy of attention. No one has ascended to nirvana poring over John Wayne Gacy content. Never mind that it distracts from the lives of victims. But Emma is not a perpetrator, and her grievances offer little actual explanation. Charlie finds himself inventing excuses! Emma is not sympathetic, nor are we invited to understand her half-remembered justifications as causes for forgiveness. The drama drives the film. Her uninteresting background sets us up for more worthy considerations.

A modest swing but a swing nonetheless. Issues broached without becoming moralizing or domineering. A couple wonderful musical moments (shout out Judee Sill and Moondog). No brooding hunks. No easily psychologizations. Just a movie. And a good one at that.