In 2024, Tinashe sang “is somebody gonna match my freak?” in her hit song “Nasty,” and the lyric became an almost philosophical way of seeing the world. Is matching freaks our ultimate goal as human beings, and what would it look like to share our freakiest self with someone else? What is allowed under the freaky umbrella?

These are the sort of questions that animate Norwegian auteur Kristoffer Borgli’s latest cinematic think piece, “The Drama,” a film about a wedding that’s not really about a wedding, nor is it really about the confession that sends the wedding off the rails. Rather, it is about what kinds of secrets we can reveal to those closest to us and still be accepted and loved by them.

To reveal the drama at the center of “The Drama” would take all the fun out of the movie — and perhaps that’s a reflection on whether or not “The Drama” works on its own at all. But in the spirit of good sportsmanship, we’ll have to talk around it, even though what Borgli has chosen as the ultimate taboo does reveal his limitations as storyteller, especially when making a film set in the United States.

“The Drama” largely takes place during the week leading up to the wedding of Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), though Borgli seamlessly zips between flashback and present in order to show us their courtship, including their disastrously awkward “meet cute” at a Boston coffee shop. Charlie stages a conversation with Emma about the book she’s reading, but she can’t hear him due to deafness in one ear. Somehow, these two ridiculously good-looking people fumble through it and find eternal happiness together and in each other’s idiosyncrasies.

Until their blissful union is rocked by a seemingly innocuous premarital ritual suggested by their married friends Mike and Rachel (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim), who encourage them to confess the worst thing they’ve ever done in advance of their nuptials. The group all owns up to their youthful folly, but what Emma confesses sends Charlie into a panic, while Rachel drops their friendship in righteous anger. Emma shrinks from the rejection and insecurity, wondering if her misguided teenage missteps will mark her for the rest of her life.

There’s a humorous irony to Emma’s “worst thing” as delivered by Zendaya, one of the biggest movie stars and most beautiful and glamorous women in the world — and also as an African American woman. There’s a strong juxtaposition in what she confesses to and her identity, and so there’s a layer of shock and comedy baked into that reveal. But Borgli also never addresses how Emma’s race plays a role in this, and it seems he’s not entirely equipped to speak to that nuance.

However, “The Drama” is really more about Charlie anyway, and how he responds to his bride’s revelation. His speculation about what her past means for their future spirals out of control, until he ultimately finds himself on somewhat of the same moral standing as her. Perhaps we all need to be brought down to each other’s pegs in order to truly see eye to eye.

Borgli writes, directs and edits his films — this one he edited with Joshua Raymond Lee — and they are impeccably crafted, with stunningly beautiful cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan capturing the life of quiet urban luxury that Emma and Charlie have built together. Borgli and Lee slice, dice and smash that reality together with a surgically precise and often witty edit, intercutting and weaving conversations and montage. Pattinson and Zendaya are terrific, unsurprisingly.

This is Borgli’s third feature film, and as an artist, he’s interested in hypothetical questions about the ills that plague modern life. In his debut feature, “Sick of Myself,” he explores a narcissist’s increasingly dangerous bids for attention, and in “Dream Scenario,” he tackled the attention economy in a lightly surreal comedy about a random professor who suddenly starts turning up in everyone’s dreams.

“The Drama” is not about attention, but it does take on another uniquely modern, uniquely American plague. Borgli enjoys playing with those aesthetics and presenting the question about what is “unforgivable,” and if there is room for redemption, but he paints the issue with too broad a brush on these sensitive, nuanced issues, leaving himself open to criticism. It is thought-provoking, to be sure, but does he finish the thought, or just provoke it?

Oddly enough though, “The Drama” is the sweetest and most humanist of his three films. At the end of the day, we are all humans just trying our best, trying to find someone to at least see our freak, and if not match it, accept it.

———

'THE DRAMA'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language, sexual content and some violence)

Running time: 1:46

How to watch: In theaters April 3

———

©2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC