Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be coming soon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [or near purple] is a link to something in the above title or the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
However, if you’d like to know more about rationale of my ratings visit this explanatory site.
The Drama (Krlstoffer Borgli) rated R 105 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
WHAT HAPPENS: Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) walks into a Boston café, sees a woman he’d like to meet (Emma Harwood [Zendaya]), tries to make small talk about the book she’s reading, she doesn’t reply so he walks away; later, he goes back to apologize if he was disturbing her earlier, she says she’s deaf in one ear so she didn’t hear him, why doesn’t he start over? It must have worked as 2 years later they’re a week away from marriage. One night as they’re walking to a wine bar to meet their married friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim)—soon to be Best Man, Maid of Honor—they notice their intended reception DJ, Pauline (Sydney Lemmon), smoking heroin in a park so the 4 of them discuss firing her which leads to a round of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Mike’s is possibly (?) the least troubling in that he pulled an ex-girlfriend between him and an angry dog; Rachel locked a developmentally-delayed child in a closet, didn’t tell any of the concerned folks looking for him where he was until they found him the next day; Charlie was such a cyberbully to a classmate the family had to leave town. Laughter accompanied each of these tales (except from Emma), despite the serious nature of what these 3 chose to share.
Emma tops them all, though, admitting when she was 15 she was so depressed and ostracized she intended to use her dad’s rifle to shoot up her school (practicing in the woods led to her ear damage), but when a shooting happened at a local mall she saw the hurt in those who knew the victims, fully dropped her plans, started advocating for gun control. The others are stunned, Rachel the most because her cousin is paralyzed from the waist down due to such a shooting.* Wedding plans continue even as Charlie’s increasingly distraught; he tries to share his grief with co-worker Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), with her attempted comfort mistakenly almost leading to sex until they stop. ⇒Later, Pauline is fired despite protesting her innocence. At the wedding reception Rachel (pushed by Charlie to attend) and Charlie both give clumsy speeches, Charlie apologizes for his actions with Misha leading to her husband, Blake (Michael Abbott Jr.), attacking Charlie as Emma leaves. Later that night bloodied Charlie goes back to that original café (he and Emma were planning on going there after the reception), Emma comes in, they talk as if they’ve just met in an effort to start their relationship lives over.⇐ Considerably more plot details are available at this site.
*All of this may seem like Spoiler material, but it comes early in the film, is crucial to understand the resulting traumas even though the studio asked critics not to reveal these specifics (those who I've read complied, but not me for reasons I've stated in this posting); also, I think anyone who’d be traumatized by encountering this plot point should have a fair warning before they'd stumble onto it.
SO WHAT? I can somewhat understand why the studio didn’t want Emma’s secret to be revealed in critical commentary about this film because awareness of the horror of what she contemplated doing might be enough to scare away potential viewers from a project that would likely pull in considerable audience attention just because of the fame of the 2 main stars and the intrigue that could be generated by being vague about a revelation that could disrupt a situation of strong romantic connection. Still, as noted both before and below, there are many survivors and people connected to horrific school shootings that shouldn’t be blindsided into what they would encounter here as soon as Emma revealed her terrible secret. I highly recommend that you explore this informative site (12:38, Spoilers) to help inform your contemplation/conversation about whether what Emma just considered doing but never acted upon is truly more terrible than what Charlie and Rachel did, which surely had miserable negative impacts on some innocent kids, yet they seem to not even be remorseful about their inhumane actions while Rachel is unequivocally disdainful of Emma while Charlie’s so confused about following through with marriage to the assumed love of his life he almost has spontaneous sex with a co-worker who briefly, easily makes herself available until he comes to his senses, even as he later makes things worse by telling the whole reception crowd that Emma didn’t kill anybody (seems we find Rachel didn’t keep her secrets-promise quiet after all).
All in the main cast have actions to be ashamed of, so we can decide who we’re willing to forgive, who doesn’t deserve such atonement. Watching this film might even stimulate us to ponder “What’s the worse thing I’ve done” and what—if anything—we’ve done since then regarding possibly-needed restitution along with changes in ourselves to move beyond any dreadful repetitions. (I’ve got my own version of this which I’ll keep private, except to say there were, thankfully, no repercussions.; how’s your past holding up by today?) Seemingly, The Drama’s title refers to Emma’s past and her present apprehensions, but among the main characters there’s plenty of guilt to share. (Who knows what secrets all of those wedding guests might be guarding, because as Jesus said: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” [John 8:7, the New International Version].)
BOTTOM LINE FINAL COMMENTS: The Drama opened in domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on April 3, 2026 with its widest coverage in 3,151 venues (still in 292 of them), has made $47.9 million so far ($76.7 million globally); if you’re interested but it’s not playing near you there’s always streaming where you can rent it for $19.99 from Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. The CCAL would generally support looking at it (with me somewhat more so)—except for some rather hostile exceptions—with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 76%, while the Metacritic average score's (as usual, lower for them) at 59%. To illustrate these responses I’ll start with my local G. Allen Johnson of the San Francisco Chronicle (RT says 4 of 4, but it’s actually 5 of 5 when you include the Little Man’s empty chair for the true stinkers): “We see Emma through Charlie’s eyes, first as an idealized woman and perfect mate, then, in a series of comically cringey scenes that involve wedding planning, as a potential femme fatale. [¶] But what is really happening is that he is exposing his own weaknesses, especially his inability to deal with conflict and stress. [… Haim] is delightfully incendiary as the unforgiving and performatively offended best friend. She also serves as the avatar for the controversy this movie is already generating.” Farther down the critics’ list we’ll find Owen Gleiberman of Variety (MC 70%) who has quibbles with the film, also gets into the realm of why some critics are loath to recommend it: “Borgli is a gifted filmmaker, but in ‘The Drama’ he never stops jumping around — back in time, and also within scenes, all to hook us into a note of toxic anxiety. He succeeds, but the mix of tones is unnerving and, at times, a bit baffling. Are we supposed to be cracking up, or sucking in our breath as the hero’s sanity cracks? […] the film also wants to say that…she really almost did it. Given the holistic radiance of the Emma we see before us (not to mention the fact that female shooters are extremely rare), that seems an unduly thin conceit.”
But if you really want to hear from the rejectors’ chorus look no farther than The Boston Globe’s Odie Henderson (MC 0 [not a misprint]): “I save the zero star designation for movies that I think have no redeeming value whatsoever or are morally repugnant. ‘The Drama’ meets both criteria. It’s the latter because of the cutesy, jokey way it handles a devastating topic. It’s the former because an interesting movie could have been made from this material, yet writer-director Kristoffer Borgli chose to throw bombs and run off giggling rather than deal with the carnage he hath wrought.” So Henderson gives you a succinctly-negative reaction, speaking for others with similar complaints. For me, I have no support for any sort of deadly violence, yet I’m not put off by Emma’s situation in this film because she recognized in time how wrong her action would be, never fired a shot, was probably too honest in admitting this situation involving her tormented adolescent self (even as I understand from my safe distance how traumatizing any reference to such events must be for survivors/families and friends of the deceased from such horrid attacks, like Emma's awful fantasy).
I think anyone who might be triggered into crisis by this film needs to know what it’s about and choose to avoid it, but for those who can watch it (even if uncomfortably) I think you’d find something worthwhile in seeing the human complexity of how someone could be so socially-alienated to even consider random homicide as well as thinking for ourselves how we’d react to a revelation such as Emma’s: Would we join Rachel in total rejection of this person or would we be more like Charlie in trying to grapple with our conflicting emotions? While you’re pondering that dilemma, take a listen to my usual review-ender of a Musical Metaphor which here is The Beatles’ "I'm Looking Through You" (1965 album Rubber Soul) because it speaks to various characters: Rachel to Emma—“I’m looking through you, where did you go? / I thought I knew you, what did I know?”; Emma to everyone—“Why, tell me why, did you not treat me right? / Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight”; Charlie to Emma—“You don’t look different ,but you have changed / I’m looking through you, you’re not the same.” Emma has changed from her high-school self (even as she says she’s never loved anyone but Charlie in her ensuing 15 years), but can those who know her accept that huge change?
SHORT TAKES
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