Written and Directed by Kristoffer Borgli | 105 min | ▲▲▲▲ | In Cinemas
There’s a tradition of Scandi cringe comedy that’s like freebasing crack versus the straight-ahead cocaine of the brand elsewhere in the world. Consider the excruciating, dark humour of The Celebration, Force Majeure, Riders of Justice, or Another Round. Norwegian filmmaker Borgli — whose last film was the Toronto-shot, delightfully peculiar Dream Scenario — is dippling deeply into the uncomfortable tradition with his new effort, The Drama. It provided the best in-cinema experience I’ve had in months, and the funniest, most painful comedy since last year’s deeply awkward Friendship.
Another aspect that recommends this picture is its particularly European look at American social mores. The Drama is difficult to talk about without revealing a key plot point, but no spoilers here. The crux is as follows: here’s a gorgeous, wealthy couple on the verge of their wedding: Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson). Zendaya is typically fetching, and Pattinson is going full Hugh Grant in his prime, down to the bumbling Englishness and floppy hair — even his name, Charlie, is the same as Grant’s in Four Weddings And A Funeral. That’s no coincidence, but the romcom tropes are about to be eviscerated even more so than they were in Celine Song’s Materialists last year.
One night Emma and Charlie are out with their good friends, another couple, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), and the wine gets them all talking about the worst things they’ve ever done. Some examples offered are egregious, most are forgivable with context, but Emma tells them something from her teen years that stops the other three in their tracks, something truly shocking.
From that inciting incident, we go on a journey into anxiety. Charlie’s world is rocked by this new information about his bride to be. The film puts us in his shoes — what would we do if presented with the possibility of psychopathy in our nearest and dearest? The Drama isn’t above illustrating the paranoia that grows in both of them with visions of what might be happening in their partner’s lives elsewhere. From then on key characters make more hideous mistakes, all leading up to one of the most disastrous, hilarious weddings ever put on screen.
Borgli knows what he’s doing here. At one point, when one character is trying to defend another by explaining the specifics of circumstance, a third asks, “Oh, so is America to blame?” The answer, clearly, is yes, but the filmmaker isn’t being didactic. This nature of society’s ills flow like an underground river beneath the feet of these characters, along with their wealth, privilege, and racial identities — the film is subtle enough not to address a lot of this directly, instead forcing audiences to become unwilling co-conspirators in a circle of judgement. Are we all the worst things we’ve ever done, or are we all the worst things we’ve even considered? Social media would suggest the answer to both of those is yes, too.
The film drops a shot of a severed ear in the grass, evoking the rotting corruption behind the white picket teeth of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Are people really listening to each other here, do we really have empathy, or are we siloed by our fear? The picture does an amazing job of driving our sympathy for one character through the central running time, shaking it off with some truly terrible decisions, then coming around on the other in the third act.
None of this would have worked as well as it does if it didn’t stick the landing. Full marks to the performers for what they deliver, getting us to care, and a final scene somehow serving up a truly lovely sentiment that the red-herring, rapidly deconstructed romcom suggested in the beginning. Can it have it both ways? Apparently so. That’s a parlour trick that might have seemed impossible midway through if the film wasn’t also concerned with getting to the truth of what commitment really means; accepting the person you’re with, finding a way to forgive their mistakes, and getting over yourself.
