The Drama (2026)

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The Drama does not pull its punches as a cringe comedy, and for that, I love it. Kristoffer Borgli’s follow-up to Dream Scenario simmers a bit in its first two acts, but the final half hour is a merciless detonation in which every possible scenario goes wrong for every character, and you feel your insides shrivel up as you watch. That sense of escalation was missing from the quirky Dream Scenario, a movie with a lively logline but underwhelming follow-through. Borgli delivers a real blow here.

But The Drama is also more than just a cringe comedy. It’s a satire about cultural taboos, about whether we are defined our worst qualities, and about the thin line between virtue signaling and diagnosing actual moral rot. Borgli’s status as a Norwegian outsider taking a clinical scalpel to American mores is a double-edged sword. On one edge, his dissection of these characters is sometimes too calculated and inhuman in the interest of to making his point. On the other edge, he can point out the idiocy in a way an American filmmaker steeped in it since birth couldn’t: Look at the mess your culture has made, Americans. Look how it’s eating you alive.

Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are an engaged couple a few days out from their wedding when they have a dinner with their Best Man and Maid of Honor, the married Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim). The four agree to share the worst thing they’ve ever done, Mike and Rachel framing it as a foundational act of marital honesty to strengthen their relationship. The marketing has carefully withheld what Emma’s confession actually is, so consider this your spoiler warning: I’m going to address it from here on.

Emma’s “worst thing” turns out to be that, as a teenager, she planned but never executed a school shooting at her high school. She admits, as a bullied loner, she found school violence aesthetically compelling, the imagery and angry online echo chambers an escape. But she never acted upon it, and in fact ultimately embraced anti-gun advocacy. Therein is The Drama’s conundrum, which you might even call a joke: Emma, a pleasant if slightly short-tempered adult woman with no obvious psychological scarring from that phase of her life, now confronts the outcome of purely hypothetical villainy decades ago.

The nasty irony is that Emma is the one who gets shunned but all three other confessions from the group are actual acts, especially Rachel’s, which is borderline sociopathic but which Haim plays off as a cheerful dinner-party anecdote. The film then spends the rest of the movie dissecting the way Charlie reacts to this revelation by Emma, how he tries but cannot reconcile it with what he knows about her. It serves as a lens into thinking about mass violence, school shootings specifically: their inherent, absurd cruelty, and how impossible it is to live with the fact that they are a part of everyday life.

Where Borgli starts to lose me is the character writing. Charlie spends most of the film unraveling in the wake of Emma’s revelation, but Pattinson’s escalating freak-out never takes shape into self-examination or an arc. Emma fares even worse as a proper character: She’s positioned as a normal and well-adjusted adult. This provides the contrast against which everyone else’s overreaction to her past can be measured, which means she ends up a flat cipher: a moral mirror with no complicated inner life except for the gap between what everyone fears about her and what she actually is. Borgli is so committed to taking a crowbar to the shinbones of American mores that he forgets to flesh out the two people whose shins he’s actually breaking. The result is a schematic satire that so convincingly executes cringe it forgets to temper it with some empathy.

But for all that, the film is consistently gripping and never predictable, and it has a special spice that genuinely elevates it to near-greatness: the editing, which Borgli cut himself. I undersold the shot-to-shot editing on Dream Scenario in my review of it, mostly because I had doubts about what it was stitching together, but it was always clever and evocative. The Drama dials that up. The editing here has a rhythmic agility and tension. Borgli exits scenes at moments of maximum comic or dramatic impact; he superimposes audio from one moment over another; and he drops in a brief hallucinated image here and there, and all flows so well.

The cast helps a lot, too. Zendaya is doing strong work, navigating an enormous tonal range with confidence, displaying just enough opacity that Emma’s cipher problem mostly disappears. It’s behind only Challengers as my favorite of her performances. Pattinson, who has so thoroughly undercut his handsome Edward Cullen image to the point that I frankly expect him to be weird and great in every new release, commits fully to Charlie’s twitchy masochism; he’s a wonderful nebbish loser, and he powers the screenplay’s gaps through sheer screen presence. Haim is an X-factor, going all in on being detestable. DP Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All, The Idol) shoots the film with a clean, unsettling beauty, and Daniel Pemberton’s score scratches at the edges of every scene to amplify the relentless unease.

So this is Borgli figuring out how to deliver on a high concept with flair, even if he hasn’t quite figured out how to make it deeply human. The Drama asks whether we are defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done — or even the worst thing we haven’t done  and refuses to let the characters off the hook or give a pat answer. Even with all the squirming, it ends with some optimism that we humans can make it through if we cut each other some slack.

Curiously, this is the first of three 2026 collaborations between Zendaya and Pattinson, with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three to follow in the coming months. They shot all three back to back. Sounds exhausting.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.