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........

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