WARNING: Spoilers ahead.
Although when it comes to “The Drama,” A24’s new “dark comedy” which hit theaters last week, the definition of “spoiler” is a bit nebulous. The mystery central to the film’s promotion — the event that derails Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson)’s upcoming wedding — comes to light in the first twenty minutes, and dominated conversation online within hours of “The Drama”’s release.
So, here it is: At a pre-wedding menu tasting, in a drunken game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”, Emma reveals that, at 15, she planned and very nearly executed a school shooting.
The drunken admission is the proverbial bullet through the windshield of Emma and Charlie’s life together, and quickly sends cracks spider-webbing in every direction. Emma’s maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), explodes, outraged, since her cousin is wheelchair-bound as a result of a mass shooting. Charlie is left reeling, unsure whether to move forward with the nuptials.
In the days leading up to the wedding, Charlie’s mind obsessively picks over invented scenes of a teenage Emma, attempting to reconcile the Emma he knows with his imagined younger version of her (played by Jordyn Curet). Eventually, Charlie’s distress comes to a head in a conversation with Misha, a coworker, who he presses for advice. When Misha responds that, in his position, she’d likely call the police, Charlie breaks down in tears. When Misha comforts him, he kisses and nearly sleeps with her, but backs out. He ultimately goes through with the wedding, which is, predictably, a mess.
By the movie (and the wedding)’s end, everything has come to light and everything has been put to rest: Charlie and Emma attempt a do-over, apparently ready to forgive and forget the worst things they’ve ever done. They live, we can only assume, happily ever after.
What’s left viewers scratching their heads is what, precisely, “The Drama” is trying to say. Is it a critique of a culture that polices “thought crimes” more doggedly than it does real ones? Is it a meditation on what it means to know someone, to think you know someone, to love someone, to trust someone? Is it an inexcusably insensitive portrait of a culture so accustomed to gun violence that we’re ready to turn it into the punchline? Nobody seems able to agree on an answer — perhaps because the movie is so insanely unbelievable that it would take a near-miracle for it to succeed in making a coherent point.
“The Drama” presents a collusion of improbabilities which, compounded together, make for a functionally impossible result. It’s a work of absurdism — reading it as anything else would require a superhuman suspension of disbelief.
The film’s first believability transgression is the starpower of its leading couple. To no fault of their own, both Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are celebrities of such stature that, to be sellable in any role, they need to be removed with dramatic distance from the real-life versions of themselves. “The Drama” fails in this goal. Emma and Charlie’s life together — coffee shops, bookstores, Pinterest-worthy outfits, Pinterest-worthy apartment — looks, essentially, like the actors’ real lives believably could (aside from the added detail of a near-murderous past).
“The Drama” is also an imagination of the dream life that most in Gen Z will never have, and there’s something that feels mean spirited about the vision of young adulthood the film presents, like an ideal dangled just out of a viewer’s — and, in fact, out of the characters’ — reach. The character’s lives at the film’s outset appear so crushingly perfect that the only reasonable reaction is to reject the possibility of such an existence: these are lives out of a twenty-first century Aesop fable, not real ones.
But there’s an even larger believability issue at the center of “The Drama.” The film proves unable, or at least unwilling, to engage on a meaningful level with the politics of gun violence in America. In a few moments, it tries: When Charlie contends that his Britishness makes this situation all the more unfamiliar and baffling, or when, in a flashback, a younger Emma pushes back against a classmate’s claim that shooters are always white men.
Despite 15-year-old Emma’s claims, mass shooters are white and are men an overwhelming majority of the time. Convincing viewers that a mixed-race woman nearly committed a school shooting when 95.4% of U.S. mass shooters in the past 30 years have been male and 54.8% have been white could, of course, be done, but would require the development of a character far deeper than Emma, with motivations more tangible and more complicated than the ones director Kristoffer Borgli offers.
Charlie’s flashbacks imagine Emma’s motives in only their most rudimentary, unconvincing form: One bully pushes her into a puddle of mud, another calls her a mean name. Behavior bad enough, Emma apparently decides, to justify their murder. Present-day Emma is unable to account for her past behavior, and doesn’t convincingly channel any of the same underlying upset or instability that drove her high school self to the edge.
The film’s premise — that this person did this thing, and that the characters of her new life must now decide on an appropriate punishment — rings completely hollow. Any point the film might be trying to make blows away in the whirlwind of its own absurdity.
