There is a great bit from the late Norm Macdonald in which he recalls someone saying the worst part of the Bill Cosby scandal was the hypocrisy. “And I disagreed,” Norm replied. “I thought it was the raping.”
That line came to mind while watching Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, a sharp and unnerving dark comedy about a culture that has lost the ability to distinguish between the socially aberrant, the psychologically disturbing, and the genuinely evil.
In an early scene, Zendaya — who is superb here, and whose acting prowess I am finally prepared to recognize without reservation — debates with her fiancé and friends whether they should fire their wedding DJ after spotting her smoking heroin on a street corner.
Borgli uses the exchange as a sly introduction to the film’s central conceit. The question soon shifts from whether a drug-addled DJ is fit to curate a wedding playlist to something more intimate and unsettling: what’s the worst thing any of us has ever done?
The Drama is one of those films best encountered cold, and its pleasures are richer for it. So I will keep specifics to a minimum. But I would urge anyone even mildly curious to watch it before reading further — this review included.
With her inhibitions loosened by alcohol, Emma (Zendaya) reveals that, decades earlier, she had once premeditated a terrible crime she never actually committed. That revelation, and the wildly different moral weight assigned to it by her fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), forms the crux of The Drama.
The film is not only built around one of the cleverest screenplays in recent memory; it is also shot and cut with comparable precision. Although Zendaya and Pattinson share such natural chemistry that Borgli hardly needs to strain to convince us they have years of shared history behind them, The Drama unfolds as the couple works on their respective wedding speeches, revealing fragments of backstory without wasting our time on anything superfluous.
For all its dark subject matter, the film is also very funny. In one especially inspired scene, a young Emma is seen recording a sort of manifesto on her computer, gravely confessing to an unimaginable act of terror, only to be interrupted by a Windows prompt asking her to update her camera driver software, followed almost immediately by the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. One shudders to think what might have happened had she owned a Mac.
Yet while Emma’s childhood plotting soon dominates the drunken conversation, on paper, it pales beside the confessions of her benighted companions. Her own fiancé, Charlie — a sort of mannered faux intellectual who quotes Freud and Nietzsche like a walking cliché — admits to cyberbullying a classmate so viciously that the boy’s entire family relocated to another city. The maid of honor, Rachel, meanwhile, once locked an autistic child inside an abandoned trailer and left him there to die. And yet, despite the palpable and lasting harm of these very tangible actions, the entire table remains fixated on Emma — the only one who never actually hurt a soul — heaven forbid she had instead admitted to voting for McCain over Obama in 2008, Charlie would have demanded she return the ring on the spot.
That is Borgli’s point. Emma’s offense is treated as the graver one because it trespasses upon a particularly charged cultural taboo within this world of radical-chic liberal glitterati. She held and glorified a gun — and, more damning still for her milieu, the broader aesthetics of firearms. In those circles, that is the unforgivable symbol. I do not know much about Borgli’s politics, but The Drama is as astute a critique as I can imagine of the sort of culture that applauds Apple for replacing the gun emoji with a water pistol.
Paranoia, too, is conveyed with real cleverness throughout the film. As the plot wears on, Charlie sinks into a self-afflicted rut, unable to reconcile the woman he fell in love with — and believed he knew intimately — with the dark episode in her past. He gazes tenderly at Emma only to see, in hallucination, her younger, inchoate self brandishing a firearm as if in a nightmare. One of the film’s funniest scenes follows soon after, when the couple visits their wedding photographer, who cheerfully runs through the shot list: first we’ll shoot the bride, then the bride’s family — and, if they’re running late, we’ll hold off on shooting the grandparents.
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The supporting cast is excellent as well, particularly Hailey Gates as Misha, Charlie’s coworker and confidante in his perceived predicament. He puts the same probing question to her — what is the worst thing you’ve ever done? — and she blithely confesses, without blinking, to being a serial cheater. Yet when confronted with Emma’s confession about a depressive episode in her youth, she instantly affects moral outrage and urges Charlie to call the police.
That warped and perniciously ambiguous moral logic is what makes The Drama so compelling. There is a sustained tension throughout the film, as it is never entirely clear where Borgli will steer the plot next. In such a crowded genre, it is a rare pleasure to encounter something this original. It is a dramatic thriller laced with wry humor and animated by the unerring suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock film. The result is a wickedly clever critique of a culture so steeped in manufactured taboos that it can no longer distinguish genuine evil from unacted-upon thought crime.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
