REVIEW: The Drama - gripping and painfully uncomfortable viewing

Do you know the worst thing your partner has ever done? Maybe more importantly, how would your shared life change if you did?

Dishevelled art historian Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson, a Brit living in the US, finds out the hard way in Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s uncomfortable, toe-curling mix of drama, satire and the blackest of black comedy. It’s unsettling stuff.

Charlie and his fiancée Emma, played by Zendaya, are just days away from getting married when they go for a very drunken dinner with best mates Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie). The booze flows and there’s no knowing where the conversation is going to go.

But suddenly it all takes a very sobering turn. They challenge each other to confess to the worst thing they have ever done, and yep, some of them are pretty bad. But Emma uncomfortably trumps them all with an admission which is genuinely shocking.

It doesn’t seem to matter that she only planned it, that she didn’t go through with it. The troubling thing is that only a bizarre coincidence stopped her apparently. And that’s more than enough for Charlie who crumples: she harboured the thought, and that’s enough.

Pattinson is terrific at giving us a decent guy whose world collapses around him; Zendaya is equally great at giving us someone who can’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. After all, she didn’t actually do it.

It’s too late, though. Everything has changed. There’s a ghastly scene where they meet up with their wedding photographer who senses the tension between them and mistakes it for pre-wedding nerves. She decides to ease those nerves by taking some pics of the happy couple. All she captures is Charlie’s grimly-forced smile.

And it gets worse… and worse… until the wedding itself, which offers painful and painfully funny viewing, the tension exploding. Rachel, another fine performance, this time from Alana Haim, is there with her fury. The horrid awkwardness of it all descends into complete car-crash territory, but it is horridly funny too. You just wonder where on earth it is all going to go and that’s what makes it so compelling.

The Drama is a film which challenges and which provokes, a film which follows its own grim logic and which keeps you utterly hooked.