Despite The Drama being an A24 movie, many audience members (including JT of City Girls fame) were duped into believing it might actually turn out to be something like a conventional “rom-com” (though it’s likely that Celine Song’s Materialists is the closest A24 will ever get to that). Even the poster for it would make the average viewer unfamiliar with “A24 stuff” believe this was some kind of “sweet” movie (which is part of what helps to make it that much more sinister). And, in its way, it actually is. That is, in the only way that a writer-director like Kristoffer Borgli can offer an audience something “sweet.” For he’s not exactly known for making anything other than searing commentaries with his work.
Although Borgli’s debut was in 2017 with a “fake documentary” (but not quite “mockumentary”) called Drib, he didn’t truly make his mark on “the industry” until 2022 with the absurdist and satirical Sick of Myself. Borgli quickly followed it up with his third film and first feature distributed through A24, Dream Scenario. It was with that particular movie that Borgli seemed to be cementing himself as A24’s Norwegian Ari Aster (and yes, Aster even has a producer credit on it). Not to mention cementing himself as a director who could secure “stars.” In that case, it was Nicolas Cage, but Borgli went even further with The Drama by attracting more “it” (read: younger) actors in the form of Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Both known for choosing “meatier” scripts when they’re not going for roles in major franchises. It’s the former who plays Charlie Thompson, a hapless sort of fellow. Or so it seems in matters of approaching women. For despite being British, his would-be charming accent hardly seems sufficient for alluring a woman as “out of his league” as Emma Harwood (played by, you guessed it, Zendaya).
Apparently taking note of her at the coffee shop one day (though it’s hard to say if he’s seen her there multiple times or if this is the first time), Charlie is so smitten that he decides to find a conversational entrée with her by snapping a picture of the book she’s reading while she briefly leaves her seat. However, here it’s worth noting that she should be wary of any man who can’t remember a simple name and title like The Damage by Harper Ellison (a fake novel, made solely for the purposes of this movie) without taking a photo of it.
Alas, she won’t know of his duplicitousness until agreeing to go on a date with him, at which time he will be forced to confess that he didn’t actually read the book and that it was just an excuse to talk to her. Rather than being entirely “flattered,” she jokes that he’s a little weirdo. A toto freak. Of course, the irony is that Emma herself has a much bigger secret that would (and will) out her as far more of a weirdo/freak. But it doesn’t reveal itself until days before the wedding. And this all because of a “harmless” little exercise that gets brought on by Charlie’s best man/best friend, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Emma’s maid of honor (though not best friend at all), Rachel (Alana Haim, continuing to expand her acting career outside of the Paul Thomas Anderson universe). That exercise turns out to be going around the table (where they’ve been doing some final taste tests for the wedding menu) and saying “the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Because that’s what Mike and Rachel did before they got married, so why shouldn’t Charlie and Emma do the same?
Of course, they’re under the “how bad could it really be assumption?,” with Mike’s worst thing being to use his ex-girlfriend as a human shield against an attacking dog and Rachel’s worst thing being to have locked a “slow” child (who she was a few years older than at the time) in a closet and not tell anyone, which meant that a search party was formed to find him. When they get to Charlie, the “best” he can come up with for his worst action is cyberbullying someone when he was a teenager. Which leads everyone’s eyes to train on Emma, waiting for her to offer her own “big reveal.” And oh, how big it turns out to be. Which is why it’s almost surprising that she’s so honest about it. But then again, she is drunk, therefore prone to such levels of honesty in this instance. However, the second she confesses that she planned a school shooting (this being the major “twist” of The Drama) when she was a teenager, it lands with a complete thud. Worse still, Rachel grows irate over this previously unknown detail, bringing up the fact that her own cousin is in a wheelchair because of a school shooting.
And so it is here—at this very moment in the film—that Borgli brings up two seminal questions of any relationship that are bound to arise sooner or later, particularly if a couple is heading toward the “marriage track.” And that is, to start: Do you really know the person you call your “sig other”? Because think of all the things you don’t know about the person you’re with simply because the topic never “comes up.” However, it’s not as if it’s an especially “deep” query, nor is this the first time it’s being posed in pop culture. In fact, Sex and the City did it glibly in season one, in the episode titled “Three’s a Crowd.” But no, surprisingly, it’s not Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) who comes up with the question, but Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), casually telling Carrie as they walk down the street, “How well do we ever know the people we sleep with?” Later in the episode, when Carrie finds out that Mr. Big (Chris Noth) was married before, she realizes, “Charlotte was right, we don’t really know the people we sleep with.”
And it’s a realization that plagues Charlie as The Drama continues from this “confession” point onward. With everything suddenly taking on a layered, macabre new meaning now that he knows Emma was this kind of person (and wondering if she still inherently is). The kind of person who would casually kill or injure multiple people. The kind of person who would lie about the reason why they’re completely deaf in one ear (this being a prominent aspect of The Drama from the very opening scene, when a close-up of Emma’s “un-headphoned” ear is shown). The kind of person who would only decide not to go through with the shooting because someone else does one at a mall in their town, prompting not only high alert, but also the chance for Emma to see what the reactions would have been had she gone through with her own plans for a mass murder.
Soon after the mall shooting, Emma is invited into the fold of a group of students who join together to create an anti-gun violence coalition. And when Emma tells Charlie this, he has to balk at the irony, likening it to the inverse of what happens in Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien, with the titular character joining the Nazis when he’s rejected by the Resistance. To his point, Emma becomes extremely pro-gun control, almost as militant about it as she was about taking the lives of various fellow classmates just a few weeks prior. Her reasoning for wanting to do so, as she explains to Charlie, is that she was consistently bullied and made to feel “less than.” However, once she found a tribe willing to embrace her, ironic as that particular tribe was, it clearly made her feel less alone.
Even so, it’s also apparent that Emma was never quite “socialized” fully, with other such tells about that reality being a conversation she has with Rachel where the latter makes her feel strange for admitting that Charlie is not only her first love, but her first crush. Rachel’s incredulous response? “At thirty?” In other words, Rachel is “subtly” reminding both Emma and the viewer that there’s something “not quite right” with this bride well before her confession.
And yet, Borgli’s “conceit” for The Drama is designed to be polarizing. For, on the one hand, there is a sect of people who would be totally unfazed by the idea that the person they were marrying “merely” planned to do a school shooting but didn’t go through with it (even if it was only because “fate” intervened). On the other, there are perhaps even more people who would be just as outraged as Rachel is about it, or as “creeped out” as Charlie quickly becomes.
Especially when “little details” start to stick out to him in new and unwanted ways. For example, in a picture of the two of them that gets some play in the movie’s trailer, it’s just Emma holding her hand up in a pose that looks like she’s only trying to show off her engagement ring. In the actual movie, Emma’s hand is in a “gun pose” (her two fingers [index and middle] and a thumb out) as if she’s aiming it at Charlie’s head. So what now seemed “sweet” feels chilling/horrifying to Charlie when he looks at it. Along with a coffee mug of his that reads, “Coffee or I’ll Shoot!” Needless to say, that mug is now ruined for him.
The word “shoot” also hits different when they’re at their photographer Frances’ (Zoë Winters) studio and she starts talking about all the people she’s going to “shoot” at their wedding. Considering they’ve just come off a heated discussion about all the, er, gory details behind Emma’s foray into the school shooter “persona,” the repetition of this phrase makes both of them visibly uncomfortable.
As it does when, in order to get them to feel more comfortable with one another while posing for the photos she’s taking, Frances says, “Remember, you know each other really well.” This, of course, only making Charlie remember that he doesn’t know his fiancée “really well” at all. And now that he does, he has to ask himself the question of whether or not he can still say he loves this person. In spite of their flaws and their past rather than because of them.
At one point, the phrase “radical acceptance” is used to describe what it takes to “forgive” Emma—or anyone with a “sordid” background—for her past transgression. But is that truly what it is to love someone when you know the full extent of their past? Of “the worst thing” they’re capable of? Is “radical acceptance” what Eva Braun would have called it? Probably not. Instead, loving someone (truly, hopelessly, etc.) is still, even when you know the worst thing about them or that they’ve done, not really a choice. No matter how much you try to talk yourself out of it with “logic” (also potentially inferring that you’re “the same” as they are—two “like-minded” individuals, as it were). Which means, in this instance, with a very significant example of someone’s penchant for turning their sadness and rage into cruelty against others.
