Last year I caught director Kristoffer Borgli’s excellent, uncomfortable DREAM SCENARIO (2023) and loved it. Darkly observant about human foibles the film was willing to allow the viewer to sit with painful emotional moments without turning away from their universality. The only cushioning it gave the audience was its base fantasy idea of a universally shared dream about a single unimportant man. With his new film Borgli has stripped even that slight bit of distancing from the story he tells and forces the audience to confront things baldly. This pays off in amazing ways as the tale told in THE DRAMA (2026) is more recognizable in kind if not in its particulars. It presents the question of how far a person’s basic human empathy and romantic commitment can be pushed. Can you love the actual, flawed person, or do you only love the sanitized image you’ve built of them in your own mind? This is a question I’ve wrestled with my entire adult life and being shown this film’s nightmare of conflicting emotions so well presented was both enlightening and distressing. It had me reexamining my own romantic relationships with a dark view of expectations and needs. The movie gives no easy answers because there are none in the reality presented. THE DRAMA is one of those rare, provocative satires that trusts its audience enough to sit with extreme discomfort and absorb the various points of view. It balances sharp dialogue, existential relationship dread, and laugh-out-loud awkwardness with flawless precision. It is easily one of the most audacious, thought-provoking, and unforgettable films I’ve seen in years and I haven’t been able to get it out of head for weeks. So, you have been warned, I guess.
THE LIST
WARRIOR QUEEN (1987) – 3 (terrible tale of Pompei and Vesuvius)
EYE WITNESS (1989) – 7 (Bava thriller about a blind crime witness)
THE LADY IN THE MORGUE (1938) – 7 (Crime Club entry is top notch)
GINA (1975) – 6 (slow-burn Canadian rape/revenge film)
THE WITNESS VANISHES (1939) – 6 (interesting Crime Club mystery)
MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE (1940) – 7 (rewatch)
DRESSED TO KILL (1941) – 7 (rewatch) (one of the best of the series)
THE DREAMING (1988) – 7 (Australian horror tale of ghosts)
THE DRAMA (2026) – 9 (excellent look at fear and trust in a relationship)
JUST OFF BROADWAY (1942) – 6 (Michael Shayne mystery that stretches credulity)
TIME TO KILL (1942) – 7 (Shayne tale adapted from a Chandler novel)
DESTINY (1944) – 6 (rewatch)
TRUCK TURNER (1974) – 7 (rewatch)
Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY (2026) - 7 (basically a remake of EVIL DEAD RISE)
SEX BEYOND THE GRAVE (1984) – 5 (Shaw Brothers combine Poltergeist, The Shining and the Exorcist and the Evil Dead to little effect)
DEATHSTALKER (2025) – 6 (the dialog is too modern but the creatures are well done)
DUST BUNNY (2025) – 9 (simply marvelous)
SPECTERS (1987) – 6 (Italian horror - feels like Fulci would have been the perfect director)
NORMAL (2026) – 7 (great little crime tale)
NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (1980) – 7
ORGY OF THE DEAD (1973) – 7 (rewatch on Blu) (a.k.a. The Hanging Woman)
TREASURE OF SILVER LAKE (1962) – 8 (rewatch)
