‘The Drama’ Has More Going For It Than A Provocative Twist

Their conversation is sincere and frank—until Borgli is shot. The rest of the short, filmed as promotional material for Sick of Myself, is dryly funny. The paramedics go to the wrong address. Borgli insists on continuing the interview and gets shot again. The interviewer hangs his head in guilt; someone tries dangling a banana in front of Borgli’s paling face. “This is the same thing that happened to Werner Herzog,” someone on the film crew exclaims. Such a short, acerbic and darkly humorous, says much about Borgli: He is a filmmaker who understands, very well, how to bait a public and lure an audience. The trick is to get shot by the public before you have the chance to be sincere—that way, you’ll never have to show your cards. Controversy has played strategically into the popularity of his latest film The Drama, which he directed and wrote. A week before the film’s release, TMZ reported that the parent of a victim in the Columbine High School shootings condemned the film for its “twist,” the same plot event that leading star, Zendaya, referenced on her recent Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance. (The twist will be discussed in greater detail in this piece.) At the same time, a 2012 essay by Borgli, published in a Norwegian magazine, garnered renewed attention after it circulated on the A24 subreddit. The essay describes Borgli’s romantic encounter with a high schooler, as a 27-year-old. “She was May; I was December,” the translated essay ends dramatically. Coyly, even. A recent Vulture headline asked: “How Much Is Kristoffer Borgli Trolling Us?” A lot, I think. Borgli called, and the public answered. The internet is alive with chatter about The Drama: This is a film about gun violence, about morality, about the state of America. It's good; it's bad; it's amazing; it's terrible. I'd argue that The Drama is, above all else, a good time in the theaters. The film is cleverly written and surprisingly hilarious. Before all other grand postulations, The Drama is a movie about an asshole and the woman he wants to marry. A flaw of the film might be that at times, it feels too dependent on its own cleverness, almost foreclosing itself from approaching even more depth by cloaking itself in irony. However, these defensive pretenses fall away as we approach the ending. At the film's conclusion is a small spark of sincerity. It happens to be just enough.