The Drama

Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian provocateur who previously gave us a man growing fungal duplicates of himself as a metaphor for male ego, has now trained his lens on something even more combustible: a wedding. Specifically, the wedding of Emma and Charlie, whose engagement-week bliss is detonated by a confession involving, depending on which critic you trust, either a near-atrocity or an actual one. The film is at pains to remind us that how we judge this confession depends very much on the race and gender of the person making it. This is not a subtle observation. The film delivers it with the confidence of a philosophy sophomore who has just discovered moral relativism and cannot stop bringing it up at dinner.

The casting does a great deal of the film's argumentative work for it. Zendaya, a Black woman, occupies the moral hot seat, and the film is acutely aware of what that means in 2026, perhaps more aware than it is of anything else. Mamoudou Athie is present in a supporting capacity, and the ensemble skews toward the kind of deliberate demographic spread that signals to the audience that this is a film with things to say about society. A24, the studio that has elevated the anxiety of cultural self-consciousness into a business model, is the natural home for such a project. The "spiky, ingenious, tasteless" descriptor that critics reach for is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, as it tends to when a film wants credit for transgression without fully committing to any position.

Where Borgli's previous work earned its provocations through a kind of cold structural rigor, "The Drama" is, by multiple critical accounts, "smugly juvenile," a film that raises charged questions about race, gender, and violence and then retreats into aesthetic overwork before answering them. The lecture energy is present and accounted for, but the lecture has no conclusion. We are left with the distinct impression of a film that confused the act of raising difficult questions with the act of grappling with them. This is a common confusion. It is not, however, a free pass.