Movie Review : The Drama (2026)

When you're in high school (and arguably in college), the ultimate measure of social status is being cool. Everything you say, wear, listen to and pretend not to care about goes in that sense and being deemed cool is the equivalent of a boxer winning a world title belt. You’re at the top of the food chain. Congratulations. Now you have to spend every waking moment of your life defending your title

After you graduate, being cool is instantly replaced with being a good person. It’s like a chip activates in young adults' brains. Being good becomes the ultimate signifier that you've "made it". Whatever that means. Two decades of school has programmed young people to make a competition out of everything, so morality becomes a popularity contest. Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama is about two people who are about to "make it" and how fragile and meaningless that idea even is.

The Drama tells the story of Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), a young couple about to tie the knot. A week prior to the wedding, Charlie and Emma are dining with their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) and the boozed up conversation eventually starts circling morality. The quarter start confessing the worst thing they’ve done and everyone complicitly admits to horrible things until Emma reveals that she had planned a school shooting when she was a teenager.

The Theatre of Morality

So, this is a movie where three people who each just confessed something horrible they did ganging up on a fourth person over something she didn’t actually do. It's a chain reaction started by Alana Haim's character Rachel's spectacularly hostile reaction to Emma’s admission, under the guise that she had a cousin paralyzed in a mass shooting that did happen. Rachel's reaction is so hostile that Mike and Charlie side with her, turning what was supposed to be an exercise in vulnerability into a moral tribunal.

That is the very definition of irony. Rachel, Mike and Charlie are each claiming moral high ground on Emma by condemning sinister thoughts she's entertained a long time ago, which somehow invalidates their own transgressions? What makes Rachel such an infuriating character is how she separates herself from Emma without trying to understand or contextualize her confession because she doesn’t want to. The only thing Rachel wants is to win a competition that doesn’t need to exist in the first place.

Now, the central moral question of The Drama’s is whether or not planning a mass shooting and not going through with it ismorally reprehensible or not? To me, what makes Emma the one I want to side with here is that she managed to overcome her feelings without hurting or implicating anyone. It’s a testament to her strength of character. Her burden is that she’s have to endure because we don’t live in a moral world. We live in a world dictated by needless, arbitrary hierarchies governed my social perception.

The Drama is somewhat of a Rachel hatefest because of that, but the most fun thing about this movie is to hate her. Rachel will make you feel morally superior by judging her, which is a neat little trick the movie pulls on its audience.

But is Rachel Actually The Worst Person in the Room?

If Rachel is Kevin Nash openly antagonizing people, the real Hollywood Hogan of this story is Charlie who’s support of Emma inexplicably wavers after the evening with Mike and Rachel. The interesting (and rather despicable) part of Charlie’s sudden crisis of confidence is that he doesn’t seem afraid of his fiancée. He seems afraid of the consequences of sticking by her. He’s not committing, he’s not breaking up with her. Charlie is hesitating and that makes him a coward.

Charlies ia a great example of a man who wants to be "the good guy" without having to take any difficult decision that's going to cost him. He's the one who hurts Emma the most. If he'd chosen to stick by her, Rachel and Mike would’ve been uninvited to the wedding and they would’ve lived the happily ever after. While we're all busy hating Rachel's spectacular display of unpleasantness, Emma would’ve been spared all this grief if her husband-to-be hadn’t been such a fucking loser.

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The Drama is a tricky movie. Kristoffer Borgli directs your attention to Rachel, but she's really the symptom of a relationship that was built on shaky soil. It's going to elicit a nuclear bomb reaction at first, but the damage is in the quiet fallout. It can feel gimmicky at first, but there’s an uncomfortable lingering depth and relatability that you’re going to carry with you afterwards. Mark it as another 2026 movie exposing cowards who go on about their lives convinced they’re the good guys.

7.8/10

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