Some critics are going to say The Drama is not about race, or that if it is, this is simply an accident born of colorblind casting. There is a reveal—the reveal the entire premise hinges on—early in the film that would perhaps make more sense to people if it had come from a white person. It’s definitely something that, historically, is more associated with troubled white American men. But this is a film, not real life, and The Drama presents us with a character viewers have never seen on the big screen before.
The fourth feature from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a young couple preparing for their wedding. During a night of wine-and-food-tasting to finalize the menu for the reception, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) play a little game with their best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim). They all sit around a table, get drunk, and reveal the worst things they’ve ever done. They go from Mike to Rachel to Charlie until it’s finally time for Emma to share. What Emma shares is the big reveal of The Drama, hinted at heavily in trailers. One would assume that the film is all about said reveal, digging into what it means for Emma to have done such a thing.
But it serves a very different function in the narrative: it exposes the underlying politics of this friend group and the flimsy foundation on which Charlie and Emma’s relationship stands. The Drama begins with Charlie working on his rehearsal dinner speech about meeting and falling in love with his future wife. He talks to Mike while he types, dreamily recalling his meet-cute with Emma and the effort he made to impress her. In his memories of their time together, Emma is a dream girl—tall, beautiful, funny, caring. In his speech, he marvels at her empathy. But later in the film, after Emma’s reveal, he deletes that sentence. And he keeps deleting sentences until the whole speech is gone. This one piece of information she shared is enough for him to call her entire character into question. So: is every moment of empathy he saw before a lie? Is she secretly a villain? This is the question that drives Charlie to sabotage his relationship with Emma, all culminating in a disastrous rehearsal dinner that ends in violence and humiliation for both.
Zendaya delivers one of her best performances, externalizing the film’s racial politics by being a perfectly normal, loving partner marginalized by the narrative constructed around her. It’s clear from the beginning that Emma is no villain and has no violent impulses––at least not anymore. We are treated to many flashbacks of Emma as an awkward teenager (played by Jordyn Curet) with glasses, frizzy hair, and no social skills to speak of. We learn that Emma was a military brat who moved around a lot and struggled to make friends in school when her family settled in Louisiana. She has a white mom who we rarely see onscreen and a Black military father (Damon Gupton) who later gives the only good speech at the disastrous rehearsal dinner. Though The Drama never discusses Emma’s biracial identity or the fact that she’s entering into an interracial marriage, her reveal exposes Charlie’s anxiety about marrying a Black woman.
Borgli presents Charlie and Rachel as seemingly open-minded, wealthy white people who panic at the idea that the Black woman they supposedly know and love could ever have violence in her past. In one revealing scene, Rachel scrambles to differentiate her Black husband, who is mild-mannered in comparison to Emma, by suggesting that he is not only incapable of violence but, from his upbringing, actively scared of it. Mike immediately refutes this, yet the scene is its own Big Reveal: part of Mike’s appeal to Rachel is that he’s a Black man who seems harmless. Charlie thought Emma was harmless, but now he’s afraid of her and can’t shake the feeling that the woman he loves is a Mad Black Woman. And despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s this fear that drives the film. Racism, not Emma, is the real villain of The Drama. Pattinson plays Charlie as a stereotypical soft white boy whose cowardice outweighs his charm. By the end, you want Emma to get as far away from him as possible.
The Drama opens in theaters on Friday, April 3.