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A24's The Drama Made Me Sit In My Car Afterwards, Just Thinking. That’s Rare
- Sakshi D
- Jun 11
- 4 min read
Zendaya and Rob Pattinson in an A24 dark comedy - need I say more?
I need to be honest with you. The second I found out Zendaya and Robert Pattinson were in an A24 film together, I was already sold.
I didn’t need a trailer. I didn’t need a plot summary. Those two names in the same sentence were enough.
What I got was something I genuinely wasn’t prepared for, a film that made me laugh, made me deeply uncomfortable, and then made me want to argue about it with everyone I know.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know
The setup is deceptively simple. Emma and Charlie are days away from getting married. They’re out with their maid of honor, Rachel, and best man Mike, wine is flowing, and someone suggests the game where everyone says the worst thing they’ve ever done. Everyone plays.
And when it’s Emma’s turn, the room goes completely silent. That’s all I’m telling you. Go in knowing as little as possible.
The way A24 marketed this film without ever revealing what the actual inciting incident is was genuinely brilliant, and I refuse to be the one who ruins it.
What This Film is Doing
Director Kristoffer Borgley has now made three films about very modern, very uncomfortable social ideas, and all of them work because he wraps genuinely unfunny topics in sharp, dark comedy without ever letting you forget the weight underneath. The Drama is his best work.
It’s about what happens when you find out something about the person you love that you can never unknow. Whether you should be able to look past it. Whether the people around you are actually qualified to judge. Whether anyone at that table has clean hands.
The film follows Charlie’s perspective more than Emma’s, which frustrated some people and I understand why, but I think it’s the right choice.
Emma’s secret is the catalyst. Charlie’s spiral is the story. Watching him rewrite his memories, question everything, and slowly fall apart is both darkly hilarious and genuinely painful.
Zendaya and Pattinson
I need to talk about both of them properly because they are the entire reason this film works.
Zendaya is extraordinary here. This is the best performance she’s given, and I say that as someone who has been following her work since K.C. Undercover.
Emma is a genuinely difficult character to play because the audience has to hold empathy and unease about her simultaneously, and Zendaya walks that line perfectly the whole way through. She brings a vulnerability and groundedness to Emma that makes you feel like you’re watching a real person processing real shame.
The scene where she tries to get Charlie to do the roleplay with her and he shuts her down is quietly devastating. She’s playing someone who already knows how to carry something terrible and is desperately trying to show you she’s moved past it. That’s a specific and hard thing to act, and she nails it.
Pattinson is doing something equally impressive from the other direction. Charlie is sympathetic and pathetic at the same time, empathetic in moments and then cowardly in the next breath.
There’s a reason Pattinson keeps getting cast in these morally messy, slightly unhinged roles. He makes the internal chaos visible without overselling it. His final speech at the wedding, a disaster unfolding in real time, is some of the funniest and most earnest acting I’ve seen this year.
What Didn’t Fully Land in A24's The Drama
Emma’s perspective gets underdeveloped. For a film whose entire engine runs on what she confesses, we don’t spend nearly enough time inside her experience.
The racial dynamics the film introduces are doing something intentional and interesting, but the film doesn’t always have the depth to fully follow through on what it’s opened up. It bites off more than it can completely chew, and a second viewing probably rewards you with more than the first one delivers.
Rachel, played by Alana Haim, is infuriatingly well written. Insufferable in the most specific and recognizable way. This is a compliment.
My Final Verdict: Should You Watch It?
A24's The Drama is one of those films that works differently depending on where you’re sitting emotionally going in.
If you’ve ever wondered how well you really know your partner, or how you’d react to finding out something genuinely dark about someone you love, this film will get under your skin in a way that takes days to fully shake. It asks real questions and then refuses to answer them cleanly, which will frustrate some people and absolutely thrill others.
I was thrilled. I was unsettled. I was genuinely moved by the ending in a way I did not see coming, given the tone of everything that came before it.
Go see it! That’s all.
