She said: "The Drama"

With The Drama, those algorithmic whizzkids at A24 - and the merry Scandie prankster Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) - have arrived at a movie to get everybody talking, save us critics. You'll doubtless have heard the set-up by now: picture-perfect young sweethearts (Robert Pattinson and Zendaya) are waist-deep in wedding plans when, during a drunken night out with friends, she confesses to the worst thing she's ever done, causing him to reevaluate all his previous certainties and sureties. Though this confession is more revelation of (former) character than rug-pulling Shyamalanian twist, it's only fair for me to allow you to discover it in context. (Should you wish to know without forking out for a ticket, the details are inevitably already out there on the Internet, including in a report by a major news outlet that also details the concern and consternation Borgli's film has provoked in some quarters.) My problem with The Drama wasn't so much with The Revelation - which, if nothing else, is evidence of an American film daring to engage with something that apparently happens in America every other day - as with The Tone, The Framing and especially The Casting. OK, Kristoffer Borgli, so you're telling me Zendaya is the sort of person who might be inspired to do this? Zendaya Coleman, with her air of ever-upright girl scout? I spent a lot of The Drama suffering unhelpful flashbacks to 2024's Challengers, which asked us to believe Zendaya might spend her nights and days concocting exotic polysexual headgames rather than colour-coding her revision notes or organising a whist drive for local elders. (But then that film also invited us to swallow the idea Zendaya was mother to a toddling child: it grows only more ridiculous in retrospect.) That Zendaya. Doing this. Okay. Sure. Whatever.

When you're just about the hottest young star on the planet, of course, you are naturally going to be offered every last role under the sun - everybody loves you; everybody wants you; everybody wants you on their poster, selling tickets - but it's Probability 101 that only a few of those roles are going to be right for you and your persona. There are a few A24-affiliated actresses - darkly brooding, more obvious malcontents: Rachel Sennott and Odessa A'Zion come to mind - who might have stood a chance of pulling this role off, but their stars perhaps wouldn't yet be big enough to have got The Drama greenlit, and even then, I suspect they'd be more inclined to send a snarky text to the group chat rather than, you know, think about doing that. The problem is systemic: today's American cinema, hung up as it has been on franchises and squeaky-clean, family-friendly fare for the better part of the last twenty years, simply hasn't recruited the kind of actors that might do justice to the issues and dilemmas Borgli, in his cackling way, is trying to address. The sometime Mary-Jane Watson and the actor formerly known as Edward Cullen are fine as the advert characters The Drama introduces to us before The Revelation, who may as well be selling us on the Doritos available in the cinema foyer, and they give of their best as the blood-and-vomit-smeared test dummies the film subsequently invites us to sneer at. But a risky concept like this needs bruising, hard-won life experience to ground it, and actors who might conceivably have brought a weapon (or some other palpable threat) into auditions; all The Drama has in its back pocket, ultimately, is a playlist. 

My suspicions grew that Borgli was using these fresh faces to zhuzh up more than faintly hoary material: as with Dream Scenario, The Drama can seem like some coded thesis on (sigh) cancel culture. Zendaya's Emma is cancelled socially for saying something you're not supposed to say in polite society; this framework enables Borgli to write a scene in which a high-schooler points out women are as likely to do The Thing as men (#notallmen) and to have a jolly good chuckle at the implications of casting a woman of colour in the role. Any objections get channelled into Pattinson's stooge, a Diet Coke-sipping wet lefty who compares this situation to a Louis Malle movie before succumbing to erectile dysfunction. I mean, again: fine, whatever, but Lacombe, Lucien was at least a film made by grown-ups who were serious about their intentions in a way the opportunistic trolling of The Drama patently isn't. Instead, what we're getting here is another of A24's sniggery, giggling ventures - it's this year's Eddington - which suggests this studio isn't just making films for kids (with kids!) but may actually also be being run by kids. As provocations go, The Drama is shorter than Triangle of Sadness, which should count for something, but it's still a rather tiresome and self-satisfied sixth former's idea of sophisticated entertainment: a movie that wants us to pay to watch folks having a rotten time, and which continues that dead-end strain of American cinema that insists on scrubbing our best and brightest young stars of any residual trace of charm. (I'm blaming Ruben Östlund and the Safdies: it's all A24's worst instincts, wrapped up in a perversely saleable package.) Pattinson is asked to be no more than helpless in the role of a simpering wreck, and he submits to yet another bad hair movie: ruffled-floppy on those rare occasions when he has it together, terribly limp and representatively ineffectual as matters get worse in his head. As for Zendaya: highly watchable actress, very promising movie star, but she can no more convince in this role than she could beat Luke Littler in the final of the World Darts Championship. We have drifted some way from the light, people.

The Drama is now playing in cinemas nationwide.