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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Timestalker review – Alice Lowe’s anti-romcom is a darkly hilarious spin through history

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The actor and film-maker’s ingenious comedy sees her play a gamut of characters who meet gory ends chasing a not-worth-it love interest

The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly – but couldn’t be sure if the butterfly wasn’t the one having the dream about him. Film-maker Alice Lowe dreams her way into a cosmically recurring persona in this likably chaotic, flawed comedy; she plays a woman who regenerates Blackadderishly throughout the years, from the 1680s to the 1980s, forever in love with the same man, forever destined to sacrifice herself for him, almost but not quite in possession of the knowledge that this guy is unworthy of her. At each stage, the incarnations of the past are perhaps dream-memories and the personae of the future are prophecies. Or … is she just very, very mad?

In 1688, Lowe is Agnes, a humble Scottish maidservant who is enamoured of a heretical preacher (Aneurin Barnard) who is about to be executed. In 1793, she is a poutingly bored noblewoman who conceives an erotic fascination for a dandy highwayman in the Adam Ant style, with the memorably annoying name of Alex O’Nine Ribbons (again Barnard). And in 1980, with leg-warmers and a frizzy hairstyle which makes her look like Barry Gibb or the Cowardly Lion, she plays a British woman in a drolly unconvincing-looking New York who has become a stalker-superfan of a new romantic pop star (Barnard once more). In addition, she is briefly to be seen as a magician’s assistant in Cleopatra costume in 1940 and even more briefly – almost subliminally – as some kind of Jane Eyre-ish schoolmarm in 1847 who is decapitated by a carriage wheel. (This last episode is so bafflingly fleeting that some of it must surely have been lost in the edit.)

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