Why The Drama Hit a Nerve (and Why A24 Saw It Coming)
A bride-to-be makes a confession. The groom's face does that thing where the muscles forget how to be a face. Cue 110 minutes of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson trying to remember why they ever agreed to stand in front of their families and lie about forever. Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama, produced by Ari Aster's Square Peg shingle, has spent the spring turning that single shocking admission into the most-discussed wedding-week meltdown in years.
The numbers tell you the conversation isn't slowing down. The film opened to $14.3M domestically, sailed past $100M worldwide, and, per Deadline, posted the highest-ever opening for an A24 production in the United Kingdom — with an audience that skewed 60% female and 80% under 35. That's not an arthouse demographic. That's a generational mood.
Variety's Owen Gleiberman has been the loudest voice naming what's happening: read alongside Materialists and Olivia Wilde's upcoming The Invite, The Drama signals A24 leaning hard into a "danger-vibe" romance brand where love itself is the horror genre. The studio has, almost without fanfare, built the deepest bench of relationship-implosion films in modern cinema. The Drama is just the chaotic, billboard-ready centerpiece — the moment the thesis went mainstream.
The Aster Connection: Square Peg's Couples in Freefall
Aster has said it for years, usually with a half-smile: Midsommar is, at its core, "a troubled couple that travels to Sweden." That single, deflating logline is the floral-crowned Rosetta stone for everything Square Peg has touched since. Strip out the cult, the bear, the screaming flowers, and you still have a woman realizing the man she loves has been quietly absent for months.
You can trace those producing fingerprints across Beau Is Afraid and Bugonia, where intimate dysfunction metastasizes into surreal nightmare — mothers, lovers, kidnappers, all blurring into the same wound. Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) is the natural collaborator: both filmmakers stage regular-ish bourgeois lives coming undone with the same deadpan cruelty, the same refusal to let anyone in the frame off the hook.
What follows are eight A24 films that share The Drama's DNA — two people, one unraveling, and a camera that absolutely refuses to look away.
8 A24 Couple-in-Crisis Films to Watch After The Drama
These are loosely ordered from gentlest gut-punch to full apocalyptic meltdown, mirroring The Drama's own slow-then-sudden tonal slide. Each one connects to a specific element of Borgli's film: the secret, the wedding, the trust collapse, the shared delusion, or that vertiginous moment one partner becomes a stranger.
1. You Hurt My Feelings
Nicole Holofcener's deceptively breezy comedy is the closest tonal cousin to The Drama, just keyed down from dread to rueful laugh. A novelist (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her husband admitting to someone else that he doesn't actually like her latest book. That's it. That's the entire detonation. The marriage doesn't end — it hairline-fractures, and we spend the rest of the film watching two adults try to remember how to drink coffee in the same kitchen.
If The Drama is what happens when one admission blows the roof off, You Hurt My Feelings is the same admission overheard through a wall. Proof A24's couple-in-crisis catalog isn't all panic and prestige horror.
2. Past Lives
Celine Song's debut turns "the one that got away" into a three-decade ache. Greta Lee and Teo Yoo play childhood sweethearts in Seoul who reconnect across continents and timelines, with Lee's American husband watching, devastatingly kind, from the third chair. Nothing detonates. That's almost the cruelty of it.
Past Lives mirrors The Drama's interest in the unspoken truth that lives, half-buried, between two people in any long partnership. If The Drama is the panic attack, Past Lives is the long exhale you take three days later, alone, on a subway platform.
3. A Ghost Story
David Lowery's elliptical grief poem is the most romantic film on this list and also, by some margin, the most devastating. Casey Affleck stands under a bedsheet for most of the runtime, watching Rooney Mara grieve, then move on, then leave, then come back across centuries he can no longer measure. There is one famous, unbroken pie-eating scene that has annihilated more first dates than any other shot of the 2010s movies.
It's the counterweight to The Drama's hot-blooded chaos: the same questions about whether two people ever really meet, asked at the volume of a hymn.
4. Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach's bicoastal divorce epic remains the high-water mark for watching two people who still love each other dismantle a life in real time. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are extraordinary; the lawyers (Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda) are the real horror-movie creatures, polite professionals who pry the marriage apart with the calm of dental hygienists.
Pair it with The Drama for the way both films find their cruelty in legalese and quiet kitchens rather than violence. It's the slow-burn movies mode of relationship horror — the wound stays open on purpose.
5. Materialists
Celine Song's follow-up is the most direct sibling to The Drama in A24's current era — Variety explicitly groups them together as the front and back of the studio's danger-vibe romance pivot. Dakota Johnson plays a Manhattan matchmaker triangulating between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, weaponizing the language of dating apps and net-worth disclosures until "love" starts to sound like a hostile takeover bid.
Watched back-to-back with The Drama, it's a near-perfect double-feature on modern romance under economic and emotional pressure: one film about the spreadsheet, one about what happens when the spreadsheet finally lies to you.
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Roll the Dice6. Midsommar
Aster's own contribution: a breakup film smuggled inside a folk-horror nightmare. Florence Pugh's Dani spends the entire movie slowly realizing that her boyfriend Christian was the monster all along — distant, dismissive, willing to forget her birthday in a room full of his friends. The cult is almost a relief.
The connective tissue to The Drama is explicit. Both films stage their fatal couple-conversation in front of an audience that refuses to look away — bridesmaids in one, flower-crowned villagers in the other. Required viewing for anyone trying to parse Aster's worldview.
7. The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos's deadpan dystopia, where single adults are checked into a hotel and turned into animals if they don't successfully couple up within 45 days. AwardsWatch, in its review of The Drama, pegs Lanthimos as Borgli's spiritual cousin — both men working in the same shock-and-awe sphere as Aster, both convinced that romantic ritual is inherently absurd.
Colin Farrell's slumped, mustachioed pathos here is the exact register of male humiliation The Drama keeps reaching for. Gateway drug to the wider Lanthimos filmography, and a bracingly mean entry in the romance movies canon.
8. Beau Is Afraid
Aster's three-hour anxiety opera isn't traditionally a "couple" film, but its core is a grown man's pathological inability to connect with any woman who enters his orbit — mother, therapist, teenage crush, stranger in a bathtub. Joaquin Phoenix sweats through every frame.
It closes the loop on the Square Peg through-line and rewards anyone who wants The Drama's chaos turned up to maximalist eleven. The deep-end pick for the Aster completists in the room — and a film that reframes the rest of this list as different shades of the same panic attack.
Where A24's Romance-as-Horror Era Goes Next
The Drama isn't a one-off. It's the loudest, most marketable entry in a brand pivot that's been building since Midsommar taught the studio how clean a breakup film cuts when you dress it in folk-horror garlands. Olivia Wilde's The Invite is next on the runway, and the early framing — couples, a destination, a knife somewhere in the second act — suggests A24 is going to keep selling love stories with something sharp tucked into the bouquet.
This aligns with a broader appetite in drama movies and romance movies that critics have been tracking for a while; IndieWire's recent breakup-canon retrospective places Marriage Story and Midsommar inside a much longer lineage of films that treat relationship destruction as the most fertile ground modern filmmakers have. The Drama's $100M+ haul on a $28M budget is just the market voting yes.
If you want to keep the marathon going past the obvious headliners, RandomFlix's roll-the-dice button is a quick way to surface deeper cuts from this corner of the catalog — the smaller, weirder titles that share the same nerve The Drama just hit.
Either way: bring tissues, bring snacks, and maybe don't watch any of these the week before a wedding.