The Drama

Snapshot

The Drama is the second English-language feature from the Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli. It follows his international breakthrough Sick of Myself (2022) and his first American film, Dream Scenario (2023). An A24 release running 105 minutes, it premiered in Los Angeles on March 17, 2026, and opened wide in the United States on April 3. Zendaya plays Emma Harwood and Robert Pattinson plays Charlie Thompson, an engaged couple whose wedding week comes apart when Emma reveals a secret from her past. Borgli wrote and directed the film and co-edited it, and he shot it on 35mm film in Boston and New Orleans. It looks like a romantic comedy, and one interviewer called it a fake one. The revelation comes early and is not a twist: the whole film is built on it. What follows is a study of how much two people can know about each other and what happens to intimacy when one partner tells everything. Against a reported $28 million budget, it earned about $132.5 million worldwide, Borgli's biggest commercial success so far. Critics were divided over whether its provocation adds up to satire.

Industry & production

The Drama continues Borgli's partnership with A24, which produced and distributed Dream Scenario. The producers include Lars Knudsen, Ari Aster and Tyler Campellone, so the film comes from the same orbit of director-driven American genre work that brought Borgli into English-language filmmaking. A24 spent much of the 2010s and 2020s as the main American home for this kind of auteur project, work that would once have gone to the specialty divisions of the major studios. Borgli's path follows a familiar A24 escalation: the modest Norwegian Sick of Myself, then a Nicolas Cage vehicle, then a film fronted by two of the most bankable young stars in English-language cinema.

Casting Zendaya and Pattinson was the headline industrial fact. Both bring franchise-scale recognition, Zendaya from Dune and the Spider-Man films and Pattinson from Twilight and The Batman, and both are also known for choosing idiosyncratic material. Putting them in the hands of a director known for corrosive comedy is the kind of calculated risk A24's model is designed to absorb.

The budget was $28 million. Principal photography began on October 21, 2024, and ran into February 2025. The Boston area stood in for the present day, with work in Back Bay, Ipswich and Andover. New Orleans hosted the flashback material, shot about two months after Boston in early 2025. Commercially the bet paid off: an opening weekend of about $14.3 million grew to about $48.1 million domestically and roughly $132.5 million worldwide. That is a strong result for an original, adult, non-franchise film, and it shows the drawing power of its leads.

Technology

Borgli's earlier features were shot digitally, with a cool, controlled finish suited to their characters' glossy and anxious self-presentation. The Drama moves to photochemical capture. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan shot on 35mm with Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 stock, using Panavision Millennium XL2 cameras and Panavision's P-Vintage lenses. The film is framed at 1.85:1 and was graded by colorist Damien Vandercruyssen.

The technical choices serve the film's two timelines. Both were shot on the same stock but graded differently. The present-day Boston scenes have a mature, low-key, naturally lit look, while the New Orleans flashbacks are more saturated. A single photochemical base split into two color temperatures lets the film tell its periods apart without changing format. It also gives the image a softness, with light bleeding in at the edges of the frame, that is new in Borgli's work.

Technique

Cinematography

The change of cinematographer is the most significant break from Borgli's earlier method. Benjamin Loeb, the Norwegian director of photography who shot Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario (and Pieces of a Woman), gave those films a deadpan, slightly antiseptic look that seemed to judge the characters quietly. Khachaturan takes a warmer, closer approach. Reviewers described a gauzy warmth on 35mm, interiors of dark wood, and light seeping in at the edges of compositions.

Above all, the film is a gallery of faces. Khachaturan has said that no film he had worked on used as many tight shots and tight portraits. He relied heavily on long lenses and zooms, which compress the couple into intimate, sometimes claustrophobic close-ups. For a film about whether one can truly know a partner, the strategy fits: the camera stays close to the face, the surface where concealment and confession both happen. The grading split between restrained Boston naturalism and saturated New Orleans memory carries the film's double time-frame inside the image itself.

Editing

Borgli co-edited the film with Joshua Raymond Lee. In his earlier work the cut is a main instrument of tone: scenes are held a beat too long, reactions are left to curdle, and escalations keep the viewer inside a character's growing humiliation. The Drama moves between the wedding-week present and the past, and here the editing divided critics. James Berardinelli of Reelviews found the flashbacks confused and objected to quick, jarring cuts and to sequences he found nightmarish and discontinuous. Natalia Keogan of the AV Club described a clearer two-part shape, with wedding preparation leading into a confession sequence that knocks the couple off balance. That is a deliberately unstable rhythm, in which the structure itself registers the shock to the relationship.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Borgli's films have always turned aspirational settings into weapons. Their interiors are tasteful and curated, the visual language of lifestyle content, and both the comedy and the horror come from behavior that will not stay inside that frame. The wedding plot gives him the genre's full ready-made set of social rituals: preparations, gathered friends, the choreography of a public commitment. The look of The Drama is warmer than Sick of Myself, with dark wood interiors and soft natural light in the Boston scenes. Keogan noted a strong theatrical streak in the direction, with characters role-playing and performing for one another. This suits a film in which a couple's shared story has to be rehearsed, revised and played out again under pressure.

Sound

Daniel Pemberton composed the score, which was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London. Borgli announced the session on Instagram. Owen Pallett's score for Dream Scenario had moved that film from comedy toward melancholy. Pemberton instead works in eerie ambient textures and uneasy, dissonant woodwind figures. The music works against the romantic-comedy surface, unsettling the wedding preparations rather than sweetening them, in keeping with Borgli's habit of using sound to disturb rather than reassure.

Performance

Borgli steers his actors toward a specific register: characters who are self-deceiving rather than foolish, played straight enough that their evasions are clear and painful. Kristine Kujath Thorp in Sick of Myself and Nicolas Cage in Dream Scenario both balanced sympathy against exasperation, and The Drama applies the same approach to two star performers.

Pattinson's Charlie drew the most detailed praise. Hannah Strong of Little White Lies described a specific, physically awkward and non-confrontational performance, a man whose panic shows up as avoidance. Berardinelli similarly noted the suppressed tension Pattinson brings. Zendaya's Emma got a more mixed response, though the reservations were about the writing rather than the acting. Strong found the character underwritten but felt Zendaya kept pace. Berardinelli, otherwise cool on the film, judged that she rises well above what he considered a thinly sketched, caricatured role. Keogan described the leads' chemistry as intense and manic. Alana Haim, as the self-righteous Rachel, steals scenes in Strong's account.

Borgli's process relies heavily on conversation. He discusses scenes at length with his actors, and Pattinson contrasted this with productions that allow little rehearsal. The result is performance as negotiation, which suits a film about two people renegotiating who they think the other is.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The premise sits inside the durable "wedding gone wrong" template. That template brings a countdown clock, a fixed group of friends and relations forced together, and a public ritual whose collapse carries the highest social stakes. Borgli's twist is to make the derailment the foundation of the film rather than its climax. Emma's revelation about her past is not a late surprise. Keogan describes a two-part structure in which pre-wedding preparation gives way to a confession sequence that unsettles the couple, and everything after it explores the consequences.

This matches the logic of Borgli's earlier films. Each takes a single premise (a woman who makes herself ill for attention, a man who starts appearing in strangers' dreams) and pushes it toward its unbearable conclusions. Here the premise is moral rather than fantastic: a disclosure that cannot be taken back, and a fiancé who has to decide what to do with it. The mode is still ironic, with sympathy and judgment arriving together, though some critics found it more earnest than his previous work. Berardinelli called the narrative half-formed. Others saw the irony as a deliberate refusal to let the audience settle into either romance or condemnation.

Genre & cycle

The Drama uses romantic-comedy conventions only to turn them inside out, which is the sense in which it was called a fake romantic comedy. It belongs to a contemporary cycle of auteur-driven, prestige-inflected romantic comedies that treat the genre's promises with suspicion and use its conventions as raw material rather than a formula. It is also part of A24's wider project of running recognizable commercial genres such as horror, the coming-of-age film and now the star-driven romance through distinctive directorial sensibilities.

Critics have placed Borgli's films in the loose category of early-2020s "cringe" or "discomfort" cinema, alongside Ruben Östlund and the anxiety comedies of the Safdie brothers. The Drama pushes that category toward the moral thriller, since its source of discomfort is a question of conscience rather than social embarrassment. With Ari Aster among its producers, it also stands near the strand of American genre cinema that uses domestic and romantic ritual as a pressure chamber.

Authorship & method

Borgli wrote and directed the film and co-edited it with Joshua Raymond Lee, which makes him its author in an unusually hands-on sense. His method is to start from a premise rooted in a recognizable contemporary pathology, such as attention-seeking, the hunger to be perceived or the fear of irrelevance, and develop it with growing literalness until satire tips into something stranger and sadder. The Drama applies that method to the ethics of disclosure. His authorship rests as much on tone as on story: he refuses to let the audience settle into comfortable laughter or comfortable pathos.

The collaborators show both continuity and change. Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster keep Borgli inside the same producing circle. Behind the camera, though, he brought in new partners: Arseni Khachaturan replaced Benjamin Loeb as cinematographer, and Daniel Pemberton succeeded Owen Pallett as composer. The move to 35mm, the closer portrait style and the warmer palette all suggest a deliberate softening of the clinical surfaces that defined his first two features. His working process, built on long discussion with actors, puts performance at the center of how his ideas are carried out.

Movement / national cinema

Borgli came out of Norwegian cinema and remains, even in his English-language work, an heir to a Scandinavian tradition of social discomfort. That tradition dissects bourgeois self-regard and is most prominently associated with the Swede Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, The Square, Triangle of Sadness), and behind him with a longer Nordic line of cold, morally searching drama. Sick of Myself was a Norwegian production that toured the international festival circuit. Dream Scenario and The Drama mark his move into American production.

The Drama is shot in Boston and New Orleans, made with American stars and released by A24, so it is not national cinema in the industrial sense. Its interest lies in a Scandinavian critical temperament working inside the American star system and applied to distinctly American subjects. Strong's reading connects the film's concerns to American debates over gun violence and its prevention, and she found it less attentive to the racial dynamics of its interracial couple than it might have been. That criticism reflects how far Borgli's export of his sensibility does and does not adapt to the specifics of its new setting.

Era / period

The film belongs to the mid-2020s, a moment when A24 had matured into a full studio, when adult, non-franchise filmmaking had largely moved to the specialty and streaming margins, and when the culture was preoccupied with self-presentation, transparency and conduct under constant observation. Borgli's films have tracked that preoccupation throughout his career. The Drama moves it from the attention economy to the more private matter of what partners owe each other in disclosure. Its box-office performance, unusually strong for an original adult drama in that climate, made it an industrial data point as well as an aesthetic one. Its two leads were testing their star personas away from the franchises that made them, which gives a film about performance and concealment a fitting extra charge.

Themes

The film's central question, in Keogan's reading, is how much we know or can know about the people we love. It asks whether complete transparency is a form of intimacy or a burden, and it treats compartmentalization both as a defense and as a quiet betrayal. The wedding is a public statement of a private truth, and Emma's revelation drives a wedge between the two. Charlie has to decide whether the person he intends to marry is the person he thought she was, and whether that question even makes sense.

Strong reads the film through the ethics of policing thought. It asks whether someone can be held responsible for what they once intended rather than what they did, and it places that question within the gap between preventing violence and managing its aftermath. These concerns grow out of Borgli's earlier interests in self-deception, the hunger to be seen, humiliation as a driver of character, and the thin line between the aspirational and the grotesque. Here they take a more explicitly moral form. The role-playing and theatricality Keogan observed make performance itself a theme: the couple's relationship is a story they tell together, and the film is about what happens when one of them changes the script.

Reception, canon & influence

The Drama was a commercial success. It grossed about $132.5 million worldwide on a $28 million budget, the strongest box-office result of Borgli's career. Critics were more divided. Keogan at the AV Club engaged seriously with its account of intimacy and disclosure and praised the intense, manic energy between the leads. Strong at Little White Lies admired Pattinson's precise, awkward performance and Haim's scene-stealing turn, but found Emma underwritten and the film's handling of race undercooked. Berardinelli at Reelviews dissented most sharply: he found the film lacking in wit and satirical bite, the flashbacks muddled and the cutting jarring, though he credited both leads with performances better than the material.

The lines of influence behind the film run through Borgli's own two previous features, the Scandinavian discomfort tradition represented by Östlund, the American anxiety comedy of the Safdies, and the A24 house style shaped in part by its producer Ari Aster. Its premise also draws on a century of wedding comedies whose conventions it reverses. Its legacy is still taking shape. For now it stands as the film in which a Scandinavian satirist directed two major stars for A24 and turned a romance into a test of conscience.