The Need for Radical Empathy, and What it Means to Change in an Era When Nothing Ever Dies
Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama (2026), follows Emma (Zendaya), a woman in her late twenties on the cusp of marrying Charlie (Robert Pattinson), whose life appears, by all measures, well settled. At a menu tasting with their closest friends, a seemingly harmless question, ‘what is the worst thing you have ever done’, cracks open a secret from Emma’s past, that the film spends the rest of the runtime asking us, and the characters to reckon with.
Borgli reintroduces us to the idea that in the digital age, the self is no longer ephemeral. It is permanently accessible through what can only be described as a technological archive. With its grainy, 35mm aesthetic and an intimacy that recalls early Clairo-era music videos, the film constructs a world where our memory is collectively held and weaponised.
A still from The Drama.
The essential core of the film lies in the idea of self-transformation and what it means to do so in an age where nothing is ever fully forgotten. Emma (Zendaya) carries within her the buried reasons for her deafness in one ear, alongside a distance from romance that stretches well into her late twenties. This resurfaces almost casually during a menu tasting for her upcoming wedding with Charlie (Robert Pattinson), where the couple, with their friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), are discussing what the worst thing they have ever done is. It is here, with Emma’s answer, that the film quietly pivots, forcing both characters, as well as us, to confront the uneasy coexistence of who someone was and who they have become.
Compared to Borgli’s earlier work, Dream Scenario (2023), which followed a mild-mannered professor who suddenly begins appearing in strangers’ dreams, silently witnessing the worst happening to them, The Drama tones down the surrealist haze that engulfed the former throughout and is a deliberate departure from that register. Zendaya as Emma is remarkably contained. So much of her case-making is done through the recorded footage of her younger self, and as an actor, she does a complete 180 from what she does in Malcolm & Marie (2019). She barely yells, and most of her arguments falter and end in tears, signalling to us that a lonely 15-year-old still curls up somewhere inside her. Her restrained intention boils quietly below the surface, arguing a case for the very human ability to change in rapidly changing times.
A still from Malcolm and Marie.
The absurdity here is located in the pauses between the couple’s interactions and the distance they appear incapable of bridging, post the menu tasting. One of the most poignant proofs of this comes through Charlie, where we see him editing out lines like ‘you’re the kindest person i know’ and ‘your empathy inspires me’ from his wedding speech document, which we had seen him write at the very beginning of the film. But aren’t these edits paradoxically a proof of the change in Emma’s character now? That the person she had become at thirty exists in radical opposition to the violent ideas she had harboured at fifteen? And yet Charlie cannot bring himself to see her the same way. This hesitation opens up what I believe is the film’s central question: Why are we unable to recognise and embrace transformation in a person when all the evidence lies right before us?
It becomes clear that Emma’s past cannot be understood in isolation and is clearly shaped by the socio-political conditions that implicate a broader American culture. Gun violence is part of a recurring structure, the politics of which rarely confronts the structural realities that produce such violence, and instead oscillates between abstract mourning and, very specifically, individualising the blame after it occurs. The film carefully situates her teenage self within the classic American ecosystem of school shootings, where her loneliness at school and exposure to extremist ideology on the internet intersect with easy access to firearms in her military household. When this pattern repeats itself with such frequency, why do we see a young Emma as an anomaly?
More pointedly, the film asks what it means when the only vocabulary Charlie can reach for, when confronted with this revelation, is a carceral one. The reflex to call the police on a thirty-year-old woman, for thoughts she harboured at 15, itself is a product of the same individualising of blame logic that is worth criticism. But Borgli seems uninterested in condemnation. We are instead shown the gaps between structural causes of the issue and her personal consequences, as we see that as soon as Emma makes friends and joins an activist group against gun violence, her perspective shifts, and she makes a clear attempt to intervene and free herself from the systems that had shaped her, all by herself. But these choices aren’t enough. Her secret continues to linger in subtle recalibrations of how others see her. Charlie, Rachel, and Mike, seemingly introduced as kind and open, find themselves incapable of extending what the film, and probably even the present times, call for: a radical sense of empathy and belief in the transformation of our fellow beings. The film doesn’t let us off this hook. We move through these tensions along with audibly hilarious and shocking dialogue, situated within sharp jump cuts and quick scene changes.
A still from The Drama.
By the end, The Drama leaves us with a discomfort surrounding ideas of what it truly means to change in a world where all versions of the past self remain accessible, and whether we as a society have developed the emotional infrastructure to accept, despite those archives. The film asks for a radical empathy that feels almost urgent, forcing us to confront our limits of forgiveness and come to terms with the idea of holding two truths simultaneously: that a person can be on the brink of doing something terrible, and that they can also have genuinely left it behind. This tension, Borgli suggests, may be the defining moral challenge of living in an age where no parts of the past are ever fully buried. As for me, what particularly eludes me is how easily Rachel, Mike, and Charlie are absolved of any guilt for their answers, when what they did had actual real-world consequences for their victims and not for them (unlike Emma, who has to live with her disability).
Siya Dulari Choudhary is a final-year English Literature student at St. Stephen's College, Delhi University.
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