LOS ANGELES — The dinner party game was Emma’s idea. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” seemed harmless enough, the kind of confession exercise that engaged couples perform for their closest friends over wine, grinning at minor misdeeds before someone changes the subject. Emma Harwood goes last. Her answer is not minor.
That scene, roughly twenty minutes into Kristoffer Borgli’s dark comedy The Drama, is the load-bearing hinge around which the film’s remaining hour turns. The A24 production, which opened domestically on April 3 and grossed $132.5 million worldwide against a $28 million production budget, arrives on HBO Max this Thursday, July 31, with a linear HBO broadcast the following evening at 8 p.m. ET. What it carries with it is four months of the kind of audience division that most prestige releases have to manufacture.
Zendaya plays Emma Harwood, a literary editor from Baton Rouge now living in Boston, days away from marrying Charlie Thompson. Robert Pattinson plays Charlie, a British museum director, with the quietly distracted warmth that has become his characteristic register for men who are sympathetic until circumstances stop permitting it. Alana Haim plays Rachel, Emma’s closest friend and maid of honor. Mamoudou Athie plays Mike, Charlie’s best man and Rachel’s husband. The evening at the center of The Drama begins as a good evening between people who genuinely like each other.
Then Emma answers the question. She reveals that as a troubled teenager in Louisiana, she had planned a school shooting. She had planned it with some precision. She did not carry it out.
What distinguishes Borgli’s handling of that admission from what its critics accused it of being is the film’s studied refusal to resolve the admission in any direction. Emma receives no redemptive backstory. Charlie delivers no verdict. Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed in a shooting, is given no eloquent speech about harm and forgiveness. The fact sits in the middle of the living room for the next hour alongside the mundane logistics of a wedding week: the menu tastings, the vow drafts, the hotel bookings. The dissonance is the film.
Borgli, the Norwegian filmmaker whose Sick of Myself (2022) and Dream Scenario (2023) established him as a specialist in the psychological horror of social humiliation, worked that same territory here on a considerably larger canvas. Shot on 35mm by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, The Drama gives Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay an autumnal warmth the script methodically undermines. Daniel Pemberton’s score retreats toward near-silence in the film’s tensest passages, refusing to cue the audience toward comfort.
The performances carry the film’s argument. Zendaya’s refusal to make Emma either monstrous or redeemable on any simple timeline has drawn the most sustained critical attention. What the actress does in The Drama is not absolution and not condemnation: it is something closer to coexistence with a self she cannot fully explain. Pattinson’s Charlie, trying to remain decent in circumstances that increasingly make decency unclear, does his most precise work in the later passages, when his certainty about who Emma is has simply stopped arriving. The two share a fluid comedic timing that critics noted even in mixed reviews.
The Drama holds a 76 percent on Rotten Tomatoes alongside a 59 on Metacritic, a split that describes genuine disagreement rather than an averaged reaction. Richard Lawson, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called the film “a deceptively simple dramedy of cold feet” and “a handsomely made, sharply performed letdown.” Odie Henderson gave it zero stars and called it “repugnant and tasteless.” Critics who admired it pointed to precisely that moral discomfort as evidence the film had done something real.
A24 chose to market The Drama as a comedy about wedding jitters, keeping Emma’s confession out of promotional materials and instructing early reviewers not to disclose the plot. The campaign generated social media debate before the theatrical release and significant criticism after. March for Our Lives described the marketing as misleading. Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel died at Columbine in 1999, said publicly that the film had humanized school shooters in a way he found irresponsible. Borgli did not contest any of it.
Produced by Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen, and Tyler Campellone under their Square Peg banner, The Drama represents the most commercially successful result of Aster’s producing partnership with A24 to date. It arrives on HBO Max under a multi-year deal between A24 and Warner Bros. Discovery, joining a week in which Jodie Foster’s A Private Life and other notable prestige theatrical releases have made the move to streaming. The window between theatrical release and digital has compressed steadily through 2026 for art-house titles.
Whether the streaming audience will receive The Drama differently than the theatrical one is a question the film cannot answer for itself. Theater audiences who felt ambushed by A24’s marketing arrived without preparation; streaming audiences in late July have had four months of discourse to condition them for what Emma’s answer actually is. The moral weight Borgli constructed does not depend on surprise. Whether audiences who already know what is coming will find the wedding-week mundane more affecting or less remains uncertain, a gap that the conversation around other recent streaming premieres has not resolved and probably cannot.
The Drama is available on HBO Max beginning July 31. The linear HBO broadcast follows on August 1 at 8 p.m. ET.
