4 min readThis review contains spoilers for The Drama.
One of the more sure-fire ways to cut-through the noise in today’s crowded media landscape is to pile on the shock. Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights sexed up a beloved literary classic. Euphoria season 3 will return audiences to a story about teens abusing opioids, and the Industry season 4 finale basically turned a beloved character into Ghislaine Maxwell. The Drama, starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, is no exception.
The new A24 film from writer-director Kristofer Borgli is yet another case of provocative storytelling designed to push the envelope. But The Drama does something a little smarter than the traumatizing media that came before it. By frontloading the controversy with a much-hyped twist within the first half-hour of the film, Borgli is able to slowly release the tension while driving toward another shocker entirely. Whether or not it works, however, is entirely dependent on how you respond to film’s first big reveal.
To my surprise, The Drama starts as a romantic comedy. A nervous Charlie (Robert Pattinson) meets Emma (Zendaya) at a coffee shop. He strikes up a conversation after he lies about reading the same book as her, and she’s still interested even when he comes clean. Their relationship progresses easily—she’s a literary dream girl, he’s a museum curator—and they’re living together in a gorgeous sunlit apartment before you know it. She wears Harper’s T-shirts. He is affable. All is well in this picturesque bubble of Boston.
Then, a week before their wedding, Emma reveals a dark secret about her past. At a rehearsal dinner, best man Mike (Mamadou Athie) and maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) explain that they told each other the worst thing they had ever done before they got hitched. Mike once used his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a stray dog in Mexico; Rachel once locked her neighbor in a closet in the woods. Charlie admits to some light cyber-bullying. It’s cute, but Emma trumps them all.
The bride-to-be admits that when she was fourteen, she planned a school shooting. She didn’t go through it, obviously. But she once took a rifle into her school with the plan to shoot her classmates. As Emma later explains to Charlie, she was very depressed in middle school and moved around a lot since her father was in the military. She was bullied, deeply alone, and drawn to the type of media online that attracts would-be shooters. She’s not a monster—and she never actually did it. For Rachel, whose cousin was paralyzed due to a shooting, Emma’s secret is indefensible. But the situation is a little more complex for Charlie.
Searching for answers, Charlie is unable to come to terms with how the person he is about to marry has suddenly become someone else in his mind. Maybe, he can get over it. He even defends her at one point. But why didn’t she do it? Well, there was a mass shooting at a nearby mall that very same day. The school was distraught, and Emma’s grief blended with theirs until she finally found a support system. Still, Charlie spins out.
As I watched the film, the twist caused me to spin out a little as well. The question— would you still marry someone who had once planned mass murder?—is so compelling that it could threaten to derail a film entirely. Thankfully, the performances keep you on track. Zendaya builds on her performances from Euphoria and Challengers to deliver a layered, hard-to-read character that demands sympathy for her (almost) misdeed. Pattinson, meanwhile, fully channels Hugh Grant’s bumbling Notting Hill energy—heightening the vertigo-inducing weirdness of his character’s dilemma.
Borgli leans into all this with snappy-as-hell edits, cutting between imagined scenes and the desperateness of the actual situation. Performances from Materialist’s Zoe Winters as an up-against-it wedding photographer and Love Story’s Sydney Lemmon as an untrustworthy DJ heighten the comedy. The script, excellent if a little flat towards the end, also keeps the tension in play throughout while never sacrificing the laughs. In fact, I laughed a lot during this school-shooting romantic comedy, which sounds odd.
I would never diminish the tragedy of school shootings, which are all too common in America. But like Charlie—whose perspective is centered through this film—I am also British, which definitely provided a helpful detachment. Plus, Charlie raises some pertinent questions throughout the film. How many people have planned something similar to Emma, but not gone through it? Why wouldn’t children find themselves negatively influenced and desensitized by these semi-regular, highly-publicized tragedies? How far are you actually willing to forgive for true love?
I’m not certain that The Drama answers any of those questions, or if Borgli even sought to by the end of the film. His impulse to provoke rather than to lecture—and to simply leave the conversation open afterwards—is enlivening enough.