The Drama is the Ideal(ized?) Romcom for our Generation
This review contains heavy spoilers for The Drama.
Kristoff Borgli’s The Drama is one of those rare films I was glad to see in theatres––at 7:15 PM on Thursday with my designated romcom buddy, to be precise. I think the individual is meant to dramatize its viewing: to perk up at that first bizarre trailer, generate intrigue with friends in the before and after, and sit through the palpable unease undercutting the theatre’s laughing, gasping, and whispering. It’s less a story and more an immersion: a “wtf” studded with stars and draped in A24’s indie acclaim. And, withholding definitive qualifiers, I posit that it’s the ideal romcom for its 2026 dating-age audience.
The Drama follows an imminent wedding between Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson). While drunk at a wine tasting, Emma reveals the worst thing she’s ever done: nearly commit a school shooting. Discomfort permeates the relationship as the two disastrously dodge their feelings over this confession––until, predictably, everything explodes on the big day.
“Performativity” is where The Drama excels. It knows its genre tropes, but more importantly, recognizes how they’re performed. Genre trope one: the meet-cute. Charlie sees Emma reading a book in a cafe. Under genre conventions, he will have read the book, and they’ll form a connection over it. However, he hasn’t—so, intent on manufacturing authenticity, he searches up the title and fakes it until he makes it. Genre trope two: the thrilling first kiss. Charlie and Emma sneak into a museum. Under genre conventions, they bond through shared rebellion, see the world in a new way, and seal their romance in an environment taut with giddiness and suspense. However, the alarms go off; and in the heat of the moment, Charlie impulsively pulls Emma in, and she stiffly reciprocates. These offsets of traditional sequences feel even sharper when placed beside even larger tropes: American girl, British boy, for example. What’s usually a recipe for silly cultural differences takes a dark turn when we witness Emma’s inability to describe and Charlie’s inability to comprehend American gun violence. In all, The Drama doesn’t reject genre tropes as much as it intentionally misexecutes them, generating an atmosphere akin to how Gen-Z-ers often takes to our childhood romcoms: with nostalgia, endearment… and the cynical observation of how “cringe” it would feel off-screen.
Paired with performativity is a refreshing surrender to the unexplainable. We exist in a modern era of “sharing our truths”: continually expected to parse out our lives, streamlining, romanticizing, “story”-fying. The Drama’s characters behave through similar impulses. Charlie desperately psychologizes Emma, while Emma fails to psychologize herself. In her flashbacks, we witness a lonely teenage girl drawn to marginal aesthetics, who gradually withdraws from the edge after finding a community in (ironically) gun-control advocacy. Emotionally, we understand Emma’s change. But logically, we have no signposts to locate it. The grating dissatisfaction of this lack is what The Drama explores. Real people aren’t simple stories––we’re messy, impulsive, and confusing. Yet still, audiences crave persuasion: a logical cause for Emma’s pathology, a logical departure from her violence. Like Charlie, repeatedly asking “why, why, why,” we long to package moral culpability in backstory, rendering it chronologically legible to consume it. When our attempts fail, we take Emma’s favorite approach: strike it out, start it over. The friction between the protagonists reveals how unsettling it feels to “know” someone nowadays: we’re not taught to recognize them, but their “stories,” their “lore,” their “drama.”
Zooming out, the metatext complements the genre and character writing. The trailers dangle Emma’s dark secret before the audience yet leave them in suspense, adopting a clickbait tactic of attention-grabbing. The title, The Drama, references not only the explicit conflict, but also Emma and Charlie’s roles as performers on the “drama stage” of their wedding—and more broadly, the stage of the film. Even the actors represent two facets of the same media-curated romance: Pattinson, in Twilight and Harry Potter, embodying our childhood indoctrination into fantasies and tropes; and Zendaya, the recently-married Gen-Z it-girl, manifesting these fantasies and tropes into our adulthoods. Put together, their sweetness and stiffness mirror the tension between what romance once was and what it’s become.
All this to say: while it’s tempting to romanticize the doom of modern love—it isn’t doomed! Or at least, The Drama doesn’t believe so. In the final scene, Emma and Charlie meet in their favorite diner: Emma’s dress, torn and messy; Charlie’s face, bloody and bruised. They stare at each other, and Emma, once again, suggests they strike it out and start it over. The offer feels absurd. But Charlie agrees. The two smile. They can’t wipe the blood off the stage. They can’t write catastrophe into a poetic episode of their relationship, and yet, they’re willing to take up the act, keep on performing, and fulfill the deception of an idealized couple together. Rosy and disturbing, it’s a fitting conclusion: that there’s no escape, but a shared act is less lonely than a solo one. In the perpetuity of our naivete, cynicism, and self-contradiction, perhaps we can still pen our “stories” with a bit of romance, a bit of comedy, and a whole lot of drama.
Jacquelyn Song is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Double Exposure. She enjoys writing silly stories, studying math paradoxes, and floating aimlessly around like a jellyfish.