A Dark Twist on Classic Romcom Drama

The Drama (15, 106 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Irresistibly naughty 

Fuze (15, 98 mins)

Rating:

Verdict: Too twisty by half 

A floppy-haired, bespectacled Englishman called Charlie, charming and dishy if a bit wet, pretends to be familiar with the novel that a beautiful young American woman called Emma is reading in a Massachusetts café.

It's a chat-up manoeuvre that would work better if he weren't so jolly awkward, and if she weren't deaf in one ear. Yet soon they are dating, then living together, then writing their respective wedding speeches.

It could be the entire synopsis of a 1990s Richard Curtis romcom, with Hugh Grant, of course, as the bumbling Brit. But from the start of The Drama, there are clues, not least in the title, that the course of true love will run anything but smooth.

The writer-director is Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian whose excellent Sick Of Myself (2022) was a pitch-black comedy.

And one of the producers is Ari Aster, another specialist in dark comedy, not to mention horror.

Moreover, Charlie is played by Robert Pattinson, who was trapped in a deeply dysfunctional relationship in his last film, Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love (2025), and is at his considerable best when his characters have something to brood over, which Charlie certainly does here.

In the week leading up to the wedding, Charlie and Emma (Zendaya, also terrific) have dinner with their best friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), at which all four, fuelled by wine, unwisely cough up to the worst thing they have ever done.

Now, I must try to avoid spoilers, but Emma's confession concerns a particularly American abomination, something that routinely undermines the claim they like to make to be the greatest nation on Earth. It is especially shocking to Rachel, although her self-righteousness is more than a little hypocritical. I can only speak for myself, but her own 'worst thing' troubled me more.

Whatever, Charlie is tormented almost to breaking point by the revelation that Emma's back story, seen sporadically in flashback, contains something so dark. 'Can we just forget about it?' she pleads. The person she was back then, she insists, is not the person she is now.

It's a defence with a powerful modern resonance, for we live in an age in which historical crimes and misdemeanours surface all the time, trashing reputations and imperilling relationships.

Is that always how it should be, or should they occasionally be overlooked – especially if, as in this case, nobody was hurt? The Drama doesn't hammer the question, but it throbs away throughout.

Charlie does his best to reassure his fiancée that he still loves and cherishes her, but the damage is done.

He is an art gallery curator who, at work, obliquely raises Emma's story with a female colleague, leading to yet further complications. One burst of ill-advised candour and the roof has fallen in.

Was it really ill-advised, though? That's the other question raised by this naggingly compelling film. If you're about to share your future with someone, and their past contains a secret that might hint at a character flaw, do you have the right to know it?

Either way, we have our own family wedding next month; my daughter's getting married.

Hoping that the reception goes better than Emma and Charlie's is setting the bar about as low as possible.

Ultimately, Borgli's film is as deep as we want it to be. Some will see it as an intense psycho-drama, others as a wickedly subversive romcom. It's both.

It's also a little heavy-handed at times, and I could have done without repeated vomiting sequences… scarcely a week seems to pass without at least one TV or film character throwing up, almost in competition with each other; as if a new diced-carrots category has been added to the Academy Awards.

But it is smartly written and directed, splendidly acted, and the premise is irresistibly naughty.

I also loved the premise in Fuze – and I'm a big fan of the director, David Mackenzie, who made the wonderful Hell Or High Water (2016). So that felt like a good start.

An unexploded bomb, thought to date from the Second World War, is discovered on a London building site. That would be tense enough, as an army bomb-disposal expert played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson arrives to tackle it, while a police officer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) oversees the mass evacuation of the area.

But wait. While all this is going on, a gang of thieves led by a South African diamond smuggler (Theo James) is in the evacuated area, smashing into a bank vault.

If writer Ben Hopkins had left it there, telling those two stories in parallel, Fuze could have been a corking thriller. But the narrative goes bonkers, with so many twists, double-twists and betrayals, followed by a clunky comic flourish at the end, that on the way out I didn't even trust the cinema employee who said, with apparent sincerity: 'Have a good night'.

All films reviewed are in cinemas now.

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Super Mario is weird. It always has been. Talking mushrooms; hostile turtles; a pair of moustachioed plumbers who colour-code their outfits and have a sideline in rescuing fairytale princesses…

But this second animated Mario movie – after 2023's billion-dollar-earning original entry – makes things weirder still, not least by going cosmic. Our heroes, Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day), and Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), have to rescue the space-princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) from the clutches of Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie) –which means that cutesy talking stars, rollercoaster planets, and a hotshot fox can now be added to the list of oddities. 

Any movie would struggle under the weight of so many new ideas, characters, and locations, let alone a 90-minute kids movie. And so it is with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG, 98 mins, HHIII).

At its worst – such as a late sequence that intercuts Mario and Peach avoiding various death traps with some nostalgia-baiting early-1990s gameplay – it feels like a new form of cartoon torture. 

Too much colour, glitter and Nintendo references all at once. But at its best? When Galaxy lingers on one notion for more than five seconds – like the early sequence in which Mario and Luigi look after the Mushroom Kingdom in Peach's absence – you realise that this film's makers really do have love for the material (and, perhaps, some respect for the audience).

Besides, there's still the real big bad of the movie, Bowser Sr – who, despite being an oversized, spiky turtle-monster, is somehow recognisable as his voice actor, the great Jack Black. 

His weirdness, at least, fits right into this weird universe.