Zendaya and Robert Pattinson Must Navigate Their Engagement Gone Askew. Oh, the This.
DIRECTED BY KRISTOFFER BORGLI/2026
NOTICE: This review openly discussed a key plot point of The Drama that some may consider a spoiler. I don’t.
In 2012, there was a film called The Comedy that wasn’t funny. Apparently, that was by design, as the Tim Heidecker vehicle is designated a “psychological drama.” Now, fourteen years later, that whole thing gets flipped. A24’s The Drama, starring It-stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, is considerably more high-profile than The Comedy ever was, and designated a “dark comedy.” Just one problem: The Drama isn’t funny. Ever.
They call this “cringe comedy”, ala The Office. The laughs lie in just how uncomfortable a situation can get as the characters invariably dig themselves deeper into whatever mortifying hole they find themselves in. This, though, isn’t really that at all. Certainly not carried out the way The Office managed it. In its defense, The Drama finds its tone early on. Not in its defense, it is the tone of “boring.”
From the moment Pattinson’s character, the nebbish Charlie, breaks the ice with Zendaya’s very Zendaya character, Emma by lying about loving the Harlan Ellison novel she’s reading (which, I don’t buy), we gather that this will be a relationship rooted in duplicity. Soon enough, Emma doesn’t fail to reveal something she’s kept completely tucked away for half of her life: When she was fifteen, she planned to carry out a school shooting. She drops this bombshell during a drunk night out with Charlie and their two sitcom-esque stock best friends, played by Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie. To say it brings the evening to a grinding halt would be an understatement. Did I mention that at this point, Charlie and Emma are already engaged to be married?
In the marketing ramp-up for The Drama, the trailer not only sidesteps the specifics of Emma’s confession, it turned that omission into a curiosity hook. Naturally, mentioning that the whole drama of The Drama is school shooting-related (even though it’s a shooting that never happened) would probably render the film instant box office poison. Is the marketing tactic that A24 went with clever or is it as duplicitous as this film’s lead characters? Also interestingly, with Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, The Drama the second movie in a still-fresh 2026 to spring the topic of school shootings onto audiences. I can’t speak to how sensitively or effectively Verbinski’s film deals with the subject, but I can say that The Drama brings it up only to largely sidestep the issue itself. The screenplay could’ve opted for any number of equally difficult issues to challenge Emma and Charlie’s engagement. It’s as though The Drama wants to both shock us with that revelation and also score points for “going there” when “go there” is all it does.
Rather than pause the engagement until Charlie works out whether this is something he can live with or not, the couple awkwardly clank along through their wedding prep, meeting with photographers, caterers, DJs, and whoever else. Every one of these interactions is a combination of low-energy dull and obnoxious, leaving the professional in question wondering why these two are tying the knot when they can’t even look one another in the eye. Charlie and Emma go back to their luxury apartment full of nice books and museum prints of major artists like Matisse and Gauguin and a framed one-sheet of Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna. Note to filmmakers: don’t remind me of a better movie during your movie, especially when said movie isn’t even top tier Bergman, but is still better than this. Also, I don’t believe that these people would be readers of the books they’re seen reading nor connoisseurs of the art that they surround themselves with.
As all roads lead to the ill-advised wedding, director Kristoffer Borgli (who fizzled hard in 2023 with the major disappointment Dream Scenario) tries to break up the monotony with persistently glitchy editing and a strangely chirpy score by Daniel Pemberton. Zendaya and Pattinson don’t ever seem to break a sweat portraying these characters, particularly not the former, as younger Jordyn Curet plays Emma in all the tonally difficult school shooting prep flashbacks scenes. Alana Haim, so great in Licorice Pizza, is smothered in this disapproving friend role. Poor Mamoudou Athie is every bit the “token Black friend” you’d routinely see in sitcoms from the 1980s and ‘90s. Worst of all is the film’s full commitment to sidestepping the nature of what it pats itself on the back for bringing up.
The real tragedy is, any of this could’ve gelled as actual comedy were the proceedings tweaked effectively in any direction. There’s a version of The Drama that lands as a contemporary zesty rom-com with a twist. There’s another version that lands as quirky full-on Brechtian weirdness. This version, however, isn’t true comedy in the modern sense at all. It’s not even good drama.