Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are making the final arrangements for their wedding.  Indulging a little too much on the wine options at the venue, they sit with the best man and bridesmaid, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), respectively.  To help break the pre-wedding nerves, Rachel suggests that they tell each other what the worst thing they have ever done is.  The conversation makes its way to Emma, who, upon revealing her deep, dark secret, ends up altering her image in the friend group, potentially beyond repair, and threatening the upcoming wedding. 

Kristoffer Borgli writes and directs The Drama for A24.  The marketing suggested this would be a dark, awkward, romantic comedy, however in action, it is more akin to a what-would-you-do social thriller as Borgli plums the depths of conscience in search of forgiveness.  Running only 105 minutes, though, Borgli is able to tease out some interesting performance moments from his cast even if it does come at cost to his thesis. 

Arguably a two hander, The Drama starts off more under Zendaya’s control as we learn about 20 or so minutes in that as a teenager she plotted a school shooting, up to and including recording her manifesto and bringing a rifle to school.  Ultimately, she never goes through with the plot due to a twist of fate that in any other film revolving around the planning of any other action would be the launching pad for a comedy of errors, but here it is supposed to be a sigh of relief; short lived, however, as the deciding factor in not following through with the attack was because someone else had attacked a mall earlier that afternoon and Emma did not want to share the spotlight with another assailant.  Perhaps this is Borgli’s way of highlighting the absurdity – and absurd here simply in regard to the prevalence – of gun violence in the United States, but he practically abandons his thesis after this hiccup in Emma’s master plan and because up until now – about half way through the film – he along with co-editor Joshua Raymond Lee engaged in some creative wrongfooting in the cut, we are unable to make heads or tails of a deadly serious topic that has been played off as merely plot setting. 

In the scenes that follow, we watch the younger Emma (Jordyn Curet) participate in group therapy after the mall shooting, and eventually become the spokesperson for her high school’s chapter of an anti-gun violence club.  This is all well and good, but in present day, we are shown flash forwards to, most bluntly, a wedding reception massacre but also more creatively a flashbulb going off every time the wedding photographer says what she will “shoot” during the ceremony. With Borgli’s choices here, this this rumination on the prevalence of gun culture in the United States almost teeters into an absurdist comedy; at least in its style as it certainly is not funny in its tone beyond some awkward, nervous laughter that may slip out from a beguiled and uncomfortable audience.  To further complicate matters, the film begins to oscillate point of view, with a first act that seems very much rooted in Emma’s point of view as she contends with the vague paranoia of her secret being let out, but for much of the second and third acts of the film, we are following Charlie who replays loving memories with his fiancé, though this time with Zendaya being replaced by Curet. We never spend enough time with Emma to really even begin knowing what to believe as her panicked thoughts are treated with the same weight as reality within the film, and we need her to be a reliable narrator for us to be able to better follow Charlie’s reckoning to come.

The Drama, despite abandoning its thesis and setting itself up for failure through its handling of Emma’s flashbacks weaved with her intrusive thoughts, still becomes its most interesting after passing the baton to Pattinson to begin trying to see Emma in the same light as he did pre-revelation.  This is where those same editing tricks that weakened Emma’s story really begin to shine as it shows Charlie finding all of these little “signs” that point to Emma’s violent behavior, and because we are trying to balance our own thoughts of Emma with Charlie, it is allowed to be a little muddied and confusing whereas with Emma, we, as the audience, need to be able to trust her even if it does allow for us to be more omniscient than Charlie.  Something as innocuous as a coffee mug alluding to needing one’s morning caffeine or else they will shoot becomes a massive argument, but we still come out of this with our suspicions against Emma.  Pattinson’s performance shines most, however, at an awkward lunch with Misha (Hailey Gates), a coworker, where he asks her hypothetically, if her boyfriend were to have planned a mass shooting event and not gone through with it, would her opinion of him change.  Pattinson holds Charlie together by threads with each wrong/affirming answer from Misha causing a thread to snap.  It all culminates in Charlie making rough physical advances on her in the break room, and from there The Drama careens into an incredible – in both good and bad ways – third act wedding. 

Had Borgli reworked his script for Emma’s secret to be anything but something so tragic and real, this wedding could have been a real barrel of laughs capping off the riotous romantic comedy that the film was being marketed as, or, had he actually handled these themes with appropriate gravitas, this finale would have been a chance to show the need to be able to confront these feelings, emotions, and thoughts with grace and not to hide them away until they break out and become a tragedy. At the very least, we could have had a biting satire. Instead, we get a real mess of a scene played for a few cheap laughs that are hardly funny, but enough to undermine any sense of actual drama teased by the title. Like Alex Garland with Civil War (2024) before him, Borgli presents an outsider’s gawking view to a deeply American problem, but is wholly unequipped to actually handle the topic with any nuance. The result is a film far too smug with itself and its barely arrived at conclusions after spending its run time in such a way that may inspire some conversation across the pond, but unless one is a sitting member of the do-nothing American congress, these common sense talking points are about as helpful as another round of thoughts and prayers on the Sunday morning news.