The Drama review: Zendaya and Robert find love in a very dark climate ★★★

What’s the worst thing your ever did? While you mull your most morally moribund moment, we can turn to the plot of Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s dramady. It hinges on a round of light-hearted, alcohol-fuelled confessions, one of which ruptures the trust between a couple who are about to get married.

You could not ask more of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, who play Emma, who works for a publisher, and art museum curator Charlie. They handle the rom-com set up of the film with the lightest of touches.

Not since Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings has the combination of floppy-haired British charm and American cool generated such chemistry.

Emma and Charlie’s first encounter is a taste of the excruciating comedy of errors that follows.

Emma is reading a book in a café. Charlie googles the publication before approaching her with considered views on the author about whom he knows nothing. It turns out the ear that is facing him is deaf. The other one is being fed music through an earphone. She eventually notices him and a relationship built on Charlie’s deception blossoms.

Yet you could ask more of Borgli’s screenplay. The drama in The Drama depends on people behaving unreasonably instead of rationally, particularly in the wake of the confession Emma makes about her past. In real life people are unreasonable and irrational, of course. But the point of a film like this is surely to make viewers think, “There but for the grace of God go I” not, as happens here, “What’s wrong these people?”.

If you want to, it is not difficult to find out Emma’s dark secret online. But better to avoid the spoiler.

I will say that it reveals an aspect of Emma’s past about which Charlie knew nothing before she slurred it out while drinking too much with Charlie, her best friend and bridesmaid Rachel (Alana Haim) and Rachel’s husband Mike (Mamoudu Athie).

From here Haim’s Rachel (the Jewish pop and screen star has forged a career as Hollywood’s most deadpan actor) is one long WTF.

Mamoudu Athie and Alana Haim[Missing Credit]

Charlie, meanwhile, tailspins into doubt about the forthcoming marriage.

True, Emma’s confession is bad. But what she revealed was a plan that was aborted, not a deed. The state of her adolescent mind at the time is hardly given consideration by those closest to her.

These doubts niggle all the way to the wedding, which is less a car crash and more a multiple pile-up with casualties strewn all over the carriageway. Fun to watch, albeit between fingers.

But the impression remains that Borgli has not made the film he thinks he has. The signs are that he wants to explore how love between soulmates is conditional.

In fact he has made a film about the moral judgments made by good, liberal people who have all the humanity of a hanging judge.

The Drama

Cert 15

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