Wait…what did you just say?

The Drama is a sly multi layered dark comedy about the stresses of the rituals we place on ourselves in society and how we lose perspective on the things that actually matter.

A happily engaged couple (Zendaya & Robert Pattinson) is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding week off the rails.

To put it plainly, The Drama is the conversations that we’re all terrified to have with each other in a world that leans on ceremony and lacks basic empathy and kindness for those around us.  It shines a light on the reality that we’re all a little more emotionally fragile then we care to admit.

If you didn’t think this movie would be uncomfortable, then you aren’t paying attention since writer/director Kristoffer Borgil and executive producer Ari Aster have teamed once again to tell us an uncomfortable but oh so relatable story…if we’re honest with ourselves.

Let’s start with the easy part first, the ritualistic nature of marriage and the societal pressures of having to spend an absurd amount of money to declare your love and dedication to another human being is one of the more emotionally destructive activities we can inflect on yourself.  Don’t get me wrong, I love…love as much as the next guy but stressing out over and getting into fights about wedding dances, flower arrangements and what drugs you think you saw your wedding DJ do out in the parking lot one evening is the kind of nonsense that can break people up rather than keep them together.

Borgil deftly takes the concept of the romantic comedy, pours lighter fluid all over and lights it on fire while stripping down to his undies to dance around the bonfire of nonsense that is the modern wedding idea.   It’s glorious to watch and features Zendaya in what just might be her best performance to date.  As the film externalizes the social and racial politics of the moment, she’s actually the voice of reason as her world is inadvertently crumbling around her.

Now here comes the hard part; the big reveal that he character has which sends those around her in the moment into a spiral is the interesting part because it’s a remind of two very salient points.

Firstly that our collective lack of understanding of mental health and the dark places that people can go BUT also how they can pull themselves out of them is so accurate and performatively judgmental.  We’re all a little broken and we’re all a little crazy and if we are all judged for our dark thoughts, society would collapse and we’d all never actually talk to one another.

This all comes out so deftly in Pattinson’s performance as a man whose processing information that he isn’t equipped to deal with because the world around him is telling him how he’s supposed to be feeling rather than encouraging conversation and kindness with the woman you are supposed to be spending the rest of your life with.

Borgil makes this struggle manic, simply hilarious and incredibly real.

The magic of this movie isn’t just how uncomfortable it makes us feel as it shows us our cruelties, but in how honest it all actually is, if only we’d open and up and talk about it.

The Drama is a call to us all to cut out the bullshit and actually be a little kinder to one another, because none of us know what the other one is going through and how close we can actually walk to the line of actually snapping and doing something we’d regret.  It’s the ugliest but almost the most beautifully humanistic film of the year.