I remember a time when A24 wouldn’t shut up about Ari Aster. Every time they made a film with that schmuck, they’d put his name on every poster and trailer in the most conspicuous way. Well, it looks like Aster has consistently made enough bad choices post-Midsommar that A24 is only doing the bare contractually obligated minimum to acknowledge The Drama as a Square Peg production. Then again, it bears mentioning that Aster is only a producer this time, with writer/director/exec-producer/co-editor Kristoffer Borgli taking on most of the actual work.

And his last picture was… Dream Scenario. Another overhyped misfire from Square Peg. Goddammit.

On the upside, A24 quite rightly put the burden of promoting this movie onto stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Both attractive and highly talented A-list stars known for making bold and interesting career moves. In fact, I find it rather odd that everyone seems to love Zendaya while everyone fucking hates Sydney Sweeney, even as the two “Euphoria” costars have remarkably similar career paths. But that’s another topic.

This is the story of Charlie and Emma, respectively played by Pattinson and Zendaya. The two have a meet-cute in a coffee shop, and some indeterminate amount of time later, they’re a week away from getting married. The plot kicks off when Charlie and Emma sit down for a wine sampling with their Best Man and Maid of Honor (married couple Mike and Rachel, respectively played by Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim).

Long story short, the four of them get into this discussion that leads to each of them disclosing the worst thing they’ve ever done. Emma discloses hers and it’s all downhill from there.

I’m not going to say exactly what Emma’s confession was, since the reveal is such a huge part of the film. More importantly, it shouldn’t matter. Partly because it happened when Emma was a stupid put-upon teenager (played by Jordyn Curet) at the time, but mostly because it never actually fucking happened!!! Seriously, Emma was only planning to do something unspeakably fucked-up, but she never actually followed through with it. No harm, no foul. Unlike the other three hypocrites at that table, who really did follow through with the deeply regrettable shit they did.

Yes, the film has its good points. Pattinson and Zendaya are both wonderful, and the rest of the cast does well enough with what they’ve got. The editing is ingenious, with some inspired cutaways and deft use of alternate takes to put us in the characters’ headspaces. I love the themes of redemption, second chances, hypocrisy, and the limits of empathy.

Here’s the problem: Borgli and Aster have already commented on those themes multiple times in several other movies (Dream Scenario, most notably). So we already know how they’re going to fuck it up.

These characters are hopelessly fucking incompetent. They make their own problems simply because the plot says so. They send every situation flying out of control for no reason whatsoever. These characters operate entirely on their worst emotions, in open defiance of their own self-interest and all common sense. There is simply no way to take this film seriously when it’s driven by so much transparent hypocrisy and self-righteous nonsense.

Charlie does a lot of stupid fucking things to make his own situation more complicated than it has to be, but the reigning champion here has to be Rachel. This awful scum-sucking bitch who has to make everything about her, cuts off all communication with her friends and then blames everyone else for the consequences, and refuses to listen to anyone who suggests any kind of compromise or solution. Oh, and let’s not forget that if Rachel herself hadn’t gotten wine-drunk and insisted that her friends — for no reason at all, against the express wishes of her own best friends and her husband — disclose the worst thing they’ve ever done, NONE OF THIS WOULD’VE FUCKING HAPPENED!!! It’s her own damn fault, she’s aggressively making everything worse, she does nothing to address that, and nobody calls her out on that bullshit!

And again — because I can’t possibly stress this enough — Emma’s crime was something she had only planned to do back when she was a teenager. Long before Rachel and Emma ever knew each other. And Rachel is holding this deep-seated scorched-earth grudge over something that literally never fucking happened! Yet Rachel and Charlie and everyone else in this movie seems dead-set on finding ways to make this a huge deal for no reason at all. It’s disgraceful.

Honest to God, I am mortified for Alana Haim. Such a promising actor with so much screen presence, and what has she done with it? She played a literal pedophile in Licorice Pizza, she got maybe two minutes of screentime before getting killed off in One Battle After Another, and now she’s playing this irredeemable shitheel. At least she fares better than Hailey Gates, who shows up for a small yet vital role in the third act, playing a character who’s somehow even more of an irrational floozy acting with no coherent motivation or logic.

Seriously, between this and Dream Scenario, Borgli seems to have a strange fixation on main characters who are ostracized and outright demonized for awful shit they never actually did. I don’t know where this fixation is coming from, but it’s bullshit. It has to stop. He’s not saying anything new or relevant or thoughtful or interesting. He’s making films that are preachy, fear-mongering, and hypocritical, loaded with deeply hateworthy characters and miserable to sit through.

Chalk up The Drama as another condescending Ari Aster failure. And until such time as Borgli finds something else — literally anything else, preferably and hopefully something based in any kind of logical reality — I never want to see another movie from him. Luckily, Pattinson and Zendaya should both come out of this unscathed, though I wish I could say the same for Alana Haim.

Fuck this movie.