Zendaya and Robert Pattinson have little interest in emotional neutrality. Emerging from Challengers and Die, My Love with their appetite for romantic volatility intact, their latest collaboration, The Drama, arrives already steeped in unease.
The newly released trailer makes it clear early that this is not a film courting comfort.
At first, it reads as controlled. Pattinson and Zendaya play Charlie and Emma, an engaged couple moving through easy intimacy: flirting in bookstores, learning their first dance, inside jokes. For a moment, The Drama plays like a feint.
Then comes dinner with their married friends, played by Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie, and the conversational provocation that detonates everything: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
For most of us, the answer would be inconsequential. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is brushing my hair with a shop hairbrush when I was five and being told, mortified, that my parents would now have to buy it. A small, survivable misdemeanour.
The others seem to offer similarly low-stakes confessions, circulating lightly, met with laughter — until Emma speaks. We don’t hear what she says, but we don’t need to. The table stiffens with Haim’s character interjecting, “Are you serious? Emma, what the f—k?”
Whatever Emma admits lands with enough force to reorder the entire evening.
From there, the film swerves. Pre-nuptial harmony collapses into panic attacks, emotional whiplash, and both figurative and literal collisions. Emma’s behaviour oscillates between volatility and menace: a sudden slap, accusations that Charlie is obsessing over “it” (the unnamed act now haunting their intimacy), and a knife lifted with unnerving calm.
Charlie, by contrast, seems to disintegrate in real time. “Remember you know each other,” a wedding photographer (Zoë Winters) instructs them, as the confession continues to hollow out whatever certainty remains.
“True love is complicated,” Charlie offers, over flashes of a car crash and unexpectedly aggressive intimacy. “It’s about acceptance — radical acceptance.”
“Why are you acting like you’ve never done anything bad?” Emma retaliates.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, The Drama extends the unnerving relational logic of Dream Scenario and recalls the acidic emotional cruelty of Sick of Myself. With Ari Aster on board as producer, emotional stability was never on the cards. Whatever Emma did remains unsaid but the mystery is tantalising.
Watch The Drama Official Trailer
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
