The Drama: sex, secrets and that gobsmacking twist – discuss with spoilers

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Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s dark dramedy is a stylish acting showcase, but does it do justice to its weighty themes? Ever since its first trailer dropped – and, on certain corners of Reddit, even before that – the internet has been abuzz with speculation over just what goes down in The Drama . The auteur production powerhouse A24 somewhat ingeniously pitched writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black film as a tart romantic comedy, with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a seemingly happy couple derailed by a disturbing revelation a week before their wedding. The actors, among a cohort of vanishingly few young movie stars, appeared as their characters in a fake wedding announcement in the Boston Globe; Zendaya’s rumored marriage to actor Tom Holland became a meta discussion point on a press tour that saw her method dressing in “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”, her wardrobe slowly darkening in a nod to something gone horribly awry. The Norwegi...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 7 – Saint Omer

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Alice Diop’s award-winning courtroom drama doubles as an unsentimental study in empathy with one of the year’s most mesmerising performances

At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.

The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.

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