To watch Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama and Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, two films that hit cinema screens this year, is to be reminded of how obsessed contemporary culture is with therapy. I suspect many of us even know the name of our closest friend’s therapist.
This, in many ways, is nothing new. In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, US historian Christopher Lasch prophetically told us “the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious”.
Lasch was certainly onto something. And his diagnosis of contemporary culture as “narcissistic” is befitting of the romantic black comedies turned frenetic interrogations of modern intimacy in The Drama and The Invite.
Both films chronicle the slow descent of trust through raw truth-telling, as the couples at the heart of each drama make public their adoption of Freud’s talking cure, with a contemptuous twist.
Though these films are about our contemporary era, they are simply modelling themselves on stories film has been telling since its inception. The 1930s and ‘40s were the golden age of the “remarriage comedy”. Is 2026 the year of its reinvention?
Staying together – or not
The 20th-century US philosopher Stanley Cavell coined the term remarriage comedy in 1981. Surveying seven films from the 1930s and '40s, Cavell defined the genre as featuring a couple who, on the threat of divorce, find a way to get “back together, together again”.
This golden age of the Hollywood remarriage comedy was dominated by beloved star pairings such as Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.
Recall the absurdity of Hepburn and Grant chasing a leopard across rural Connecticut in Bringing up Baby (1938), or Grant and James Stewart scheming for Hepburn’s hand in marriage in The Philadelphia Story (1940).
The pairs (or trios) banter, bicker and playfully dance through witticisms and innuendos until dawn.
While the couples exhibit an intelligent and nimble sensibility (“sometimes talking, sometimes not, always in conversation”, as Cavell puts it), they see continual actions of (re)commitment as ample enough reason to remarry. Psychological subtext was not a dimension they essentially navigated.
But in 2026, the psychological has truly come into play – and staying together is no longer assumed, or even necessarily championed.
The Drama and The Invite are loose iterations of their predecessors: the central couples, on the threat of divorce (or in the case of The Drama, an engagement break-off), find a way back together, although with a zanier, more psychological implosion.
In the past few months, you’ve probably overheard or been in a conversation where someone asks, “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
This is the question that haunts romantic lead Emma (Zendaya) in The Drama. It is at the crux of the social discourse around the film itself.
In each film, the central couple’s rhetorical implosion reaches operatic heights against the backdrop of mid-century-modern turned designer-level apartments.
While the couples bicker, insecurities served on a platter, Borgli and Wilde ask viewers to look inward and raise the same magnifying glass to their own real-life partner: what are you not telling me? Who are you really?
These pointed questions have become a customary demand in modern relationships. The Hepburns and Grants of the world were more comfortable with just being in each other’s company, silent or otherwise; they didn’t have therapists and social media urging them to anxiously probe the slightest misstep.
Relationships as therapy
The Drama quickly departs from its meet-cute between Emma and stranger-turned-fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson), into a psychological frenzy about revelation and fixation. There are wedding speeches that make you squirm, and deceitful behaviour that asks you to continually switch your moral certainty between characters.
The Invite is smaller in scale but not in absurdity. Angela (Wilde) invites sex-obsessed upstairs neighbours Pina (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton) over for dinner one night; a plan sprung on her mildly depressed husband, Joe (Seth Rogen) as he walks through the front door.
While Pina and Hawk demonstratively exhibit their sexual attraction, Angela and Joe bicker and vehemently hold contempt for each other. This incessant tension (sexual or otherwise) among an attempted foursome ultimately leads the film to its tragic conclusion.
Psychotherapist Esther Perel was a key consultant on Wilde’s set. When we reach the film’s final act, Pina sits cross-legged, opposite the now sombre and defeated Angela and Joe, and questions the couple’s destructive dynamic: Pina embodies the role of a therapist.
While the couples in the films do not actually see therapists, proximate characters intervene with “therapy speak” – a foreign concept to that of their remarriage predecessors.
Little room for trust
This contemporary psychological hysteria does not exactly match the tone of Cavell’s remarriage comedies.
In today’s world, trust in the other has lost currency. The adamant search for authenticity certainly demands a price, and the fixation on forced self-revelation means we risk missing the moments that are genuinely playful and innocently zany.
In 2026, one wonders how much pathologising about the other is too much. Borgli and Wilde leave little room, if any, for trust. Yet when they do, we might ask what can be re-learnt through the art of being together in silent company.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
