Two couples. Too much wine. One loaded question: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
The revelations that tumble from that truth-or-dare-style drinking game badly test a young couple in Kristoffer Borgli’s baffling “The Drama,” which wastes two of the planet’s most gorgeous people and will surely get everyone involved in trouble for using a current American tragedy as a plot point.
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya star as Charlie Thompson and Emma Harwood, a genteel, engaged couple in Boston — he’s a museum curator and she’s a literary editor — whose relationship is upended when she reveals a dark secret from her past.
That secret shakes Charlie’s love for his intended, messes with work, affects his performance in bed and prompts him to spiral out, overacting at every step. Of course, it dents his desire to get married. Can he ever see his love in the same way again?
“Can we just forget about it?” she asks him. “I don’t want you to fixate on this.” But he can’t help it: He has visions, gets paranoid, watches friends — including a brilliant Alana Haim — run away.
“The Drama” is billed as a “sexy, contemporary romantic comedy” but the only accurate word in that description is “contemporary.” The on-screen chemistry between Pattinson and Zendaya is more sibling-like — even before the revelation — and this is nowhere near a ha-ha rom-com like “Anyone But You.” Not many romantic comedies have projectile vomiting and bloody wounds.
How well you really know someone is legitimate grounds to explore in a romantic drama, but writer-director Borgli has stumbled by making a wedding satire while putting a finger into a societal raw gash that’s never something to use as a relationship test, which here is — spoiler alert — a school shooting.
It turns out Emma, as a bullied 15-year-old, planned a school assault with her dad’s shotgun but never went through with it. She even became an anti-gun advocate, but no matter. “She’s obviously not the person you thought she was,” says a friend.
The Norwegian Borgli, whose script namechecks French filmmaker Louis Malle and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, could have picked any subject to attempt to unmoor this couple — an affair, some pyromania, a minor felony, even an egregious dine-and-dash — but he picked a planned mass murder. And in a semi-comedy, or at least a cringe-comedy. It’s too much to ask of this couple — or this movie.
Zendaya has been promoting “The Drama” by wearing something old, something new and something borrowed. She’s trolling us that she might be already married to Tom Holland. But, again, she’s also promoting a movie with an attempted school shooting.
Borgli leaves clues that his would-be couple are in trouble right from the beginning. In the first scene, Charlie spots Emma at a coffee shop and fibs about loving the book she’s reading, establishing lying at the basis of their relationship. We then watch them navigate the wedding-industrial complex, with visits to photographers and florists, mining humor from the weirdness of freelance wedding DJs and a very aggressive dance instructor. The fact that the couple emitted few sparks when they were in love compounds the lack of investment when that love collapses.
And yet the topic of school shootings — so cavalierly introduced — won’t go away. Borgli makes it almost a laugh line — in one scene, Charlie tosses Emma’s “Coffee or I’ll Shoot” mug into the trash. But the writer-director has miscalculated badly. Maybe he’s trolling America but “The Drama” is clearly the worst thing he’s ever done.
“The Drama,” a A24 release that hits movie theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language, sexual content and some violence.” Running time: 104 minutes. One star out of four.
