The Drama of Sublimation: Ugly Truths, Radicalised Youth and the Crisis of Connection

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama arrives like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the wedding-industrial complex. Zendaya’s Emma and Robert Pattinson’s Charlie are the sort of couple neoliberal culture sells us as aspirational: cultured, attractive, ostensibly secure in Boston’s creative class. He’s a museum curator; she’s a literary editor. Their meet-cute is awkward-cute, their engagement photoshoots absurdly commodified. Then, over too much wine with friends, dark truths detonate this love story. Emma confesses that as a bullied 15-year-old, she planned a school shooting with her father’s shotgun. She never pulled the trigger—another massacre at the local mall “upstaged” her—but the revelation rips their picture-perfect romance apart. Charlie spirals into paranoia. The friends recoil. The wedding hangs by a thread.

On the surface, it’s black comedy: sardonic, provocative. Borgli name-checks Louis Malle and Sigmund Freud, layering psycho-horror sound design over romcom tropes until the bourgeois id screams. But beneath the cringe lies something sharper. The Drama isn’t just about whether you can ever truly know and accept your partner. It’s about how late capitalism radicalises the young, pathologises their pain, and then demands they sublimate that pain into “normal” adult relationships. And it refuses to let us look away from the ugly truths we must risk exploring if we’re ever to build something better.

The film’s flair—and its political provocation—lies in treating Emma’s aborted act of violence not as individual pathology but as a symptom of a society in freefall. Bullying, isolation, easy access to guns, the constant background hum of mass shootings: these are not personal failings. They are the logical outcome of an atomised, competitive culture that tells young people their worth is measured in likes, credentials and resilience. Emma’s rage wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was forged in the same crucible that produces climate despair, gig-economy precarity and the epidemic of youth mental illness. That she later channels it into anti-gun advocacy is classic Freudian sublimation—aggressive instincts redirected into socially useful (if still haunted) work. The film forces us to ask: how many “recovered” young people walk among us, carrying unprocessed trauma while we pretend the system that broke them is fine?

This is where Borgli’s satire bites hardest. Charlie’s meltdown isn’t heroic introspection; it’s male panic dressed up as moral reckoning. He can’t bear the idea that the woman he loves once contained the capacity for catastrophic violence—because that would mean admitting that the pressures he himself feels (the quiet desperation of cultural work under neoliberalism, the fear of obsolescence) could push anyone over the edge. The adjacent relationships in the film mirror the fragility of all our connections. We perform stability while everything around us frays. Intersectionally, the film’s power deepens. Emma is a young Black woman. Her bullying isn’t colour-blind; it intersects with race, gender and class in ways the film gestures toward but never fully spells out. Radicalisation isn’t reserved for white incels in this story. It’s a broader indictment of how marginalised youth internalise the violence of a system that both hyper-visible-ises and erases them.

Throughout their unravelling romance, Jesse Rae’s “Inside Out”, the couple’s song, pulsing through a few key scenes of tentative reconnection and confrontation. Its insistent chorus urges “don’t give up,” a plea for perseverance in love when revelation threatens to shatter everything. But the title does far more: it captures the film’s Freudian demand to turn the relationship inside out, exposing the suppressed rages and hidden vulnerabilities that polite society insists we keep locked away. In this way, the track becomes both romantic lifeline and political provocation—reminding us that real connection demands we risk the mess, rather than paper over the cracks with performative normalcy.

I see The Drama speaking directly to the anxieties my generation carries into dating. Young people today navigate relationships under conditions of profound economic and existential precarity. Dating apps reduce us to market value. Housing costs make cohabitation a luxury. Mental health crises are individualised rather than politicised—therapy speak replaces collective action. The “ugly” in relationships—the resentments, the past traumas, the suppressed rages—becomes catastrophic precisely because we have no collective language or infrastructure to hold it. Borgli’s sardonic lens shows us the cost: trust collapses, intimacy curdles, love itself feels impossible. Yet the film also insists these risks must be taken. To refuse the conversation is to remain trapped in the same bourgeois denial that produced the crisis.

Under capitalism, mental health is privatised suffering; radicalisation is pathologised as individual evil rather than social failure. We get more surveillance, more “resilience training” for the young—never the redistribution of resources, adequate public mental health infrastructure, or the democratic control of the economy that might actually prevent the next horrifying act of youth violence. The Drama doesn’t offer policy solutions, of course. It’s a provocation, not a manifesto. But its refusal to resolve neatly—its willingness to leave us uncomfortable—mirrors the real work ahead. We cannot divert the contradictions of our age. We must name them, explore them, risk the mess of true solidarity.

In the end, Emma and Charlie’s relationship becomes a microcosm of the larger drama facing many young people today: how do we love—flawed, haunted, furious as we are—when the world is structured to make connection feel like a luxury we can’t afford? Borgli’s film doesn’t pretend the answer is easy. It simply insists we stop pretending the question doesn’t exist.