PREMISE
A happily engaged couple is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding week off the rails.
THE GOOD STUFF
PATTINSON & ZENDAYA– These two give world class performances here. To go from the typical romantic comedy stuff that’s being displayed in the first 20 minutes of this thing, to the escalating heaviness of the continuation of the story is just real professional movie star stuff. They have many scenes together that have the character saying one thing to each other but giving physical signals of genuine discomfort, disappointment, disillusionment, longing, and rage. There’s a lot of screaming and yelling but the magic of these two performances are what’s going on underneath. These are two characters that grow more and more mentally exhausted at the film continues. By the end of the film these characters walk different, make less eye contact, and their speeches become longer and drawn out. It is in the last 20 minutes of the film were you truly see them speaking without talking. Really impressive stuff.
ALANA HAIM– Equally impressive is the performance of Alana Haim as one of the more unlikable movie characters in all of 2026 so far. Her performance is mostly done in close up with her sitting in a stationary place. It’s all the more impressive that she’s basically playing the physical manifestation of passive-aggressiveness, and one of the worst on-screen movie BFF’s that I can remember. She has a speech towards the end of this movie that is just…..
By the last 10 minutes of the film, every shot that cuts to her face gave the audience that I saw this movie with audibly negative pavlovian responses. She did her job beautifully here.
THE BAD STUFF
THESE CUTAWAYS– Sometimes there will be a character in this movie that is talking for more than 10 seconds, and then as they continue talking there will be a cutaway to a moving image further emphasizing what the character is talking about in the scene. Sometimes, in one monologue there might be two or three of these cutaways, and of those two or three cutaways one or two of them might be completely unnecessary and done for the sake of style over substance.
Whenever a character has a high stakes emotional moment we’re getting cutaways. For transitioning in between scenes we’re getting cutaways……I think you get the point. The ratio of the cutaways that work as opposed to the ones where you’re wondering why they’re there at all are about 55/45 in favor of the ones that shouldn’t be there. When the scene is staying still WITH NO CUTAWAYS, the best moments of the movie come out. I’m hard-pressed to believe that a test screening audience wouldn’t point this out, but what do I know?
PATTINSON’S ACCENT– In all the movies where I’ve seen Robert Pattinson play an american, (or someone who is NOT BRITISH) I’ve never seen the accent slip up as much as in this movie. He does have an American accent that works for a while, then it goes to Mickey 17 narrator territory, and then in the last scene of the film there just sounds like there’s flat out British inflections of certain words. It’s just that the last scene is so good that he kind of deserves a pass. This might be something that just bothers me..
THE UGLY STUFF
THE ABSENCE OF RATIONALITY– Not too long ago I saw a movie called SPEAK no evil with James McAvoy. In my review of that movie I recall saying that I’d never seen a group of characters make wildly terrible decisions on purpose for the sake of advancing the movies plot without any sense of realism behind them. That is until now. Wildly terrible decisions entirely drive the plot of this movie.
There are about four or five times in this movie where if a character simply doesn’t do the stupid reckless thing, or say an incredibly hurtful thing they don’t have to say at the worst time to say it…then the whole story changes drastically. The climactic scene of this film involves a wedding scene where all of the characters that have proven to be problematic to the continuation of the marriage over the course of the film are dressed to the nines and present to cause chaos. At no point in the film are any of them uninvited. Given the situations that this movie presents, this would never ever happen in real life. Not to say that these kinds of movies need to be 100% true to life or anything like that, but there is levels of stupidity that forbid you of your suspension of disbelief.
*************
Ultimately this is a movie I respect more than I like. There’s nothing really flashy about this as far as it’s aesthetic, or the dialogue, or even the music. A lot of stuff is basically done just so that the actors can do their thing. All the complaints that should be lodged towards this movie goes towards the story and characters and not the performances. Director Kristoffer Borgli seems to be a student of the Guadagnino / Almodovar School of melodrama, and that’s actually a good thing.
This works as a film to start plenty of conversations when the movie is over. You should probably see this with a group of people or at least a spouse of yours. Hopefully you guys are in good standing when you do. Otherwise this movie might inadvertantly trigger some things that you might not want brought up.ย
THE DRAMA is in theaters now
