The Drama: The Art of Falling from Grace

 

The Batman movie and Spider Man’s girlfriend. I need a reason to watch the movies I watch or listen to the albums I listen to. I don’t do it by chance.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Well, Robert Pattinson stole the Batman suit to take pictures with it in the bathroom. He thought they weren’t going to give him the role, so he wanted a souvenir.

Me? I threw my cousin off a bridge into a river. It wasn’t very high. The river was small. They pulled my cousin out quickly. Nothing happened to her. We were about five or six years old. Nobody remembers that anymore.

These days, cancel culture reaches anyone. The witch hunt is brutal. But it no longer only happens in the world of actions, it has reached the world of ideas and thoughts. You want to be spontaneous and express yourself freely, but sometimes the internet won’t tolerate it. One mistake or a false step and you’re met with zero tolerance. The modern Holy Inquisition. The thought police.

What if we just try it again? Is thinking something as bad as doing it? Isn’t there freedom in the kingdom of our thoughts? I believe ideas are meant to be exposed, debated, and even destroyed. I don’t think it should be the same with people. How do we move forward and grow in a world that censors ideas and destroys those who generate them? Getting offended quickly only shows the limitations of our intellect.

The film works like a “Woody Allen and his girlfriend Brenda Ann Spencer.” We couldn’t talk about Woody Allen or Brenda Ann Spencer, the one from “I Don’t Like Mondays”, in a world of intolerance and censorship. Pattinson does a fantastic Woody Allen in a movie that has shades of Allen’s uncomfortable, intellectual comedies. Zendaya plays a frustrated Brenda Ann Spencer who only made it as far as the idea. Pattinson, an expert in eccentric roles, gets to go from one extreme to the other. Zendaya didn’t have that same opportunity; the depth of her character was limited to a series of flashbacks. Being sandwiched between Pattinson and the extraordinary Alana Haim is no easy task. Haim is a force of nature on screen who steals every scene she’s in. Credit to Zendaya for constantly taking part in better and better films.

Doomcoms are my thing. The antithesis of the romantic comedy, like Materialists. Pattinson expresses it wonderfully. How do you turn drama into comedy in an instant? The Drama starts as drama but transforms into a comedy, a very dark one, that could even resemble the cinema of Lars von Trier. The Drama is not too far from Materialists, though it is fiercer, surrealist to the point of absurdity. Director Kristoffer Borgli does it again. He previously made a powerful satire that left you thinking infinitely about virality with Dream Scenario alongside Nicolas Cage, and now he returns with a moving analysis of cancel culture and public lynching.

Make one false step, have one politically incorrect idea, and your life goes to hell. How do you manage to be yourself when everyone is waiting for the slightest mistake to send you to the stake? Is it better to live in fear? Can you really tell everything to those you trust the most? The worst thing you’ve thought does not equal the worst thing you’ve done, and it shouldn’t condemn you for the rest of your life.

What if we just try it again? What if we turn the drama into a comedy? What if we accept that saying what we think can be uncomfortable? Don’t we keep repeating that we need to get out of our comfort zone? The Drama is a powerful exercise in reflection on thought and action in difficult times for speaking freely, daring to make mistakes, and correcting them if necessary.

That story about my cousin still haunts me. I was a child, a stupid impulse, a second that could have ended badly and fortunately didn’t. But imagine if someone had recorded it. Imagine that in your thirties someone digs up that video and decides you’re an irredeemable monster. It doesn’t matter that a whole lifetime has passed since then. It doesn’t matter that your own cousin laughs at the memory today. In this world, one out of context clip is enough for them to erase you.

That’s why The Drama hits so hard. It’s not just a movie. It’s an uncomfortable mirror that forces us to look ourselves in the eye. It reminds us that ideas, even the darkest ones, deserve space for reflection. That making mistakes is human and that violence begins when we turn every stumble into a social death sentence.

Pattinson, Zendaya, and Borgli achieve something rare: they make you laugh while tightening your stomach. They leave you with the feeling that maybe, just maybe, we can still save the space to think out loud without fear of being burned in the digital public square. Let’s hope we try again. Because if not, we’ll all end up silent, perfect, and empty.