The Drama (2026)
SPOILERS
One of the most frustrating things in narrative is when a story has a compelling idea that it fails to fully develop and explore. For the The Drama (2026), that core idea can be summarized with the question, “What would you do if you found out something terrible about the love of your life?” This is the dilemma that Charlie (Robert Pattinson) finds himself in when his fiancé Emma (Zendaya) reveals, during a drunken night out, that the worst thing she’s ever done is plan and almost perform a school shooting when she was a teenager. From here, the film follows Charlie and Emma as they navigate this revelation. Emma tries to do damage control with Charlie and his friend Rachel (Alana Haim), and Charlie tries to make sense of how Emma could have ever come so close to doing something so terrible. Tensions rise between the two as Charlie becomes distant from Emma, doubting the kind things he wrote about her in his wedding vows, and constantly seeing her in his mind’s eye holding guns and embracing the aesthetics of an edgy teen school shooter. Tensions rise further when Charlie has an emotional breakdown at work which leads to him kissing his co-worker Misha (Hailey Gates), which comes back to haunt, and headbutt, him during the wedding reception. The film ends with the not so happy couple at a diner pretending to have just met for the first time. Maybe everything will work out for the two of them after all.
Despite the dark premise of the film, it is surprisingly funny. There are strong performances from the lead and supporting actors and the way Charlie agonizes over the reality of preparing to spend his life with Emma in light of this big reveal is compelling and leads to some great scenes and cinematography. But, for all these strengths, the film ends up feeling incomplete by the time the credits roll. This is mainly because the film spends much of it’s runtime watching Charlie agonize over the situation, raising moral questions and hypotheticals all along the way, only to have him sidestep the issue with the realization that he doesn’t want to be without Emma. While this allows the film to end on a hopeful note, it avoids any kind of committal answers to its conflict. This could have been an intentional choice to encourage the audience to discuss the film. Like Charlie’s friends, the moviegoer is posed with the question of what they would do if their partner had done something so dark and terrible. The problem is that leaving the audience with an open question rather than presenting them with a position to debate is unsatisfying. It would have been much more interesting if Charlie had some sort of stated position that informed his choice. Then, the audience would be responding to the film rather than just talking about a hypothetical posed by actor Robert Pattinson. In the absence of any substantive perspective on the problem, the film feels hollow and edgy rather than thoughtful and daring.
Hotel for Ghosts 