Borgli likes to have his fetishism and skewer it too. At one point, Charlie flips through a gallery catalog of chicks-with-guns portraits pointedly titled Brainrot, as if placing the film’s not-so-hidden theme in plain sight. The point of such semiotic gamesmanship is to make the filmmaker look like he’s being smart about some larger, ambient stupidity; to suggest that The Drama’s own taboo tableaux are suitable for framing. Like his producer Ari Aster, whose Eddington similarly cultivated a brainrot, Borgli splits the difference between pandering and pondering, which doesn’t quite add up to anything like analysis.
There was a smart idea at the center of Dream Scenario, which drew on Nicolas Cage’s recognizability in its fable about a man dealing unexpectedly with the perils of overnight overexposure. That film’s theme of cancellation surely bleeds into The Drama, which is pressurized by Emma’s fear that people—including Charlie—are talking behind her back. Both plotlines appear more personal in light of Borgli’s own confessional essay about having dated a 16-year-old when he was in his late twenties. The essay, titled “May-December,” was originally written in 2012 for the Norwegian magazine D2 but resurfaced on Reddit a week before The Drama’s release date. Like Emma, Borgli has a deeply off-putting backstory, one that he is nonetheless moved to share, to present to the public less in a spirit of confession than confrontation.
The reaction to Borgli’s piece, which is adorned with unapologetic age-gap anecdotes (“She never laughed at my Seinfeld references,” he recalls of his 16-year-old inamorata) and shout-outs to Woody Allen, has threatened to surpass his film’s carefully prepared surprises. The sentiments of “May-December” manifest in The Drama at a molecular level in the supremely queasy sequence where Charlie, crashing out hard in the wake of Emma’s story, has visions of himself canoodling with her sullen 14-year-old incarnation (Jordyn Curet)—a sight gag that sticks in the collective craw.
