The Drama

The Drama starts with a couple who seem to have everything in order and uses that appearance of stability to turn intimacy into a testing ground. Kristoffer Borgli is not interested in a conventional romantic comedy, but in observing what happens when a relationship begins to deform under the weight of guilt, shame, moral judgment and the need to fit another person into a comfortable version of who we think they are.

I find the idea much more interesting than the result. There is something stimulating in the way the film questions how easily we judge a person's actions without stopping to consider what may lie behind them. At several points, what bothered me most was precisely that: characters reacting with anger, indignation or rejection without sufficiently considering the previous pain, isolation or experiences that may have shaped someone. Understanding does not mean excusing, but ignoring context does not help us understand either.

That is one of the conflicts I found most interesting. The film plays with the distance between what a person did and what everyone else decides that act says about their entire identity. That moral reduction is uncomfortable because it feels recognizable: one fact can bury everything else under a label. Borgli seems to want to explore that fragility, although he does not always go as deep as he could.

I was also interested in the way the film uses certain cultural references and songs to introduce violence that exists beyond the couple. They are not merely decorative, but reminders that behind stories turned into icons or popular anecdotes there were real people, difficult contexts and questions that are rarely asked with the same intensity as the judgments that come later.

The problem is that, emotionally, the film eventually lost me. As the characters move into increasingly extreme registers, I felt more distance rather than greater involvement. There is pain, guilt, crying and emotional collapse, but it reached me in a way that felt too underlined. Instead of being pulled along with them, I started watching the mechanism from the outside.

That affects Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in particular. I know both have enormous critical prestige, but they still do not convince me much as performers. Pattinson, especially, falls back for me into a restrained, inward and rather monotonous register that I have seen from him too many times. Zendaya has more moments of intensity, but I also find her range limited when a role asks for something beyond presence and gravity.

Paradoxically, some of the supporting actors interested me more. Mamoudou Athie has a natural quality I always appreciate, and Alana Haim again shows that she has a very unaffected screen presence. Whenever they appear, the film breathes differently, less concerned with proving that it is saying something important.

Borgli handles discomfort well. There are silences, tonal shifts and situations where you are not quite sure whether to laugh, feel uneasy or distrust what you are watching. That ambiguity is probably the best thing about the film. It never fully becomes a comedy, romantic drama or psychological thriller, and sometimes that uncertainty creates an interesting tension.

At other times, though, it has the opposite effect. The film seems so aware of its own strangeness and provocative intentions that it starts to feel affected. There were moments when I felt I was watching a work more determined to make me uncomfortable than to build genuine emotion. The psychological sophistication becomes too visible, and once you see the strings, the provocation loses power.

I do not think this is an empty film. It has ideas about identity within a relationship, guilt, shame, collective morality and the way we judge other people's pasts. Some of them are quite powerful. But not all are developed with the depth they promise, and above all, the film never made me connect emotionally with its protagonists.

The Drama struck me as a curious, risky and occasionally stimulating film, but also an artificial one, too conscious of its own provocation. I was more interested in what it wanted to discuss than in how it ultimately made me feel. When a film wants to leave you devastated but ends up creating distance instead, something has gone wrong along the way. It is not a bad film, but it did not leave the mark its ambitions seemed to promise.