In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, film culture was overtaken by provocative movies for adults driven by a central ethical or moral dilemma. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation in 1974 grappled with the oncoming wave of surveillance and the end of true privacy in American life. In 1993, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia explored the stigma of HIV and how America was treating sick and dying gay men. For decades, movies like this more frequently drove ticket sales and conversation all around the world.
But in the more corporate studio-dominated landscape of the 2010s and the 2020s, these kinds of movies have become rarer, with cinemas full primarily of IP fare like Star Wars and comic book adaptations that have brighter colors and clearer lines between who is good and who is bad. But every once in a while comes a movie like The Drama, a new A24 film from writer/director Kristoffer Borgli starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
The Drama examines an engagement under pressure. The week of their wedding, fiancees Emma and Charlie play a game with their friends where they all reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done. When one fiancee isn’t ready for the other’s secret, it throws the rest of their week into disarray as their wedding continues hurtling toward them even as they try desperately to sort out their own feelings and intentions. At once an ethical dilemma film grappling with a very serious topic of American discourse and also a wedding farce with plenty of hilarious commentary on the wedding industrial complex, The Drama is the kind of movie you want to see before dinner, so you and your friends can chat all night about the movie’s characters and their motivations.
The Drama is out now.
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