Warning: This Review May Contain Spoilers! (And a content warning for violence, gun violence)
The Drama. 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. 7.5/10 on IMDB. 3.8-star average on Letterbox. And everyone seems to disagree.
Last week, I traveled to Dundee to see The Drama, Norwegian Writer/Director Kristoffer Borgli’s newest feature for studio A24. Before I start on the reason we’re all here, though, I want to say something small yet meaningful for the DCA, Dundee’s Contemporary Art Center. I love the DCA. I will always love the DCA. Amazing energy, great food/drinks. They do classes and printmaking workshops! I will watch every film at The DCA. Student tickets are 7 pounds only. Come on! Anyway, back to The Drama.
Unless you’re a film purist who for some reason insists on even avoiding trailers, you’ve most likely come across The Drama’s hook. Here’s a couple, and seemingly a young, successful, attractive, and for all intents and purposes idyllic couple: Emma and Charlie. And they’re getting married! Then, Emma says something at a dinner: a secret. After it comes out, everything has changed. We descend into chaos. We’re fighting, we’re screaming, we’re dancing! But the hook is everything, isn’t it? What is Emma’s secret? What did she do? Well, sorry, but you’ll need to see it in theatres to find out.
And I did.
SPOILERS! Here’s your last chance. Turn back now.
Here it is. In a game proposed by Rachel, Emma’s insane and truly evil friend, played brilliantly by Alana Haim, Emma reveals that the worst thing she’s ever done was fantasize and plan out a school shooting when she was fourteen years old. She didn’t do it, but she planned it out completely and even brought a weapon to school with her.
It’s a tasting for their wedding when Emma shares her secret, actually, and the wine is pouring. Charlie thinks she’s joking, but Rachel flips out. She’s screaming, she’s enraged. She exclaims that her own cousin was paralyzed in a shooting when she was younger. It’s really bad. And it won’t get better again, not for the rest of the film. So, yeah. We’re really in for it.
Echoing a young Hugh Grant at his most suave and bumbling, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie carries the film’s charming (and misleading) opening, cutting between scenes of him writing out his vows and him and Emma’s meet-cute. Aided by the quick-cut and sharp editing style, in part done by Borgli himself, The Drama feels like whiplash from the jump, and you’re thrilled to let it happen. Emma’s reveal at the dinner table is the first time the camera stops flying, and we just sit still – it’s torturous. And when the action and pacing picked up again shortly after, I was both dreading the fallout and grateful for the relief!
The Drama is nothing if not dynamic. It moves at lightning speed, and it takes you along for the ride the whole time. I kept waiting for the tension or the pace to fall or plateau, but they never did. I was on the edge of my seat, or on the edge of my seat and covering my eyes the entire time, but I was never disengaged. Not once.
And with a film that covers such controversial and sensitive subject matter, it’s genuinely a massive feat, how funny it is at the same time. Picturing and grappling (poorly) with a side of Emma he never knew before, Charlie’s going fast down a steep hill with no brakes, which Borgli represents by swapping Zendaya’s Emma out for a teenage version of her in many of Charlie’s memories. It’s jarring, and hilarious, and really just silly to look at. The theatre around me couldn’t stop laughing either.
Borgli’s writing is extraordinary, and I found myself struck by that unavoidable and extreme envy of pitch-perfect dialogue. The side characters and cameos are such a vital aspect of the film’s lasting comedy as the main plot continues its descent into hell. The DJ! The photographer. I mean, come on! I should also respond to another common thread I’ve seen in reviews of the film, that Zendaya’s Emma isn’t given enough to be “known” the same way that Charlie is.
I understand this point: Emma is certainly further from the audience, quieter, and harder to read at times than the obviousness of Charlie’s plight. At the same time, Borgli is presenting Charlie’s story as a reckoning with what he doesn’t know about Emma and the trauma of realizing she may not be the person he thought she was. If Emma were as clear and open to the audience as Charlie is, wouldn’t we also lose out on his mystery? Regardless of what you see of her interiority, I never doubted its existence once. Rather than seeing a flat character, I felt that the film showed us a slice of a truly three-dimensional one, and this is absolutely due to the genuine honesty and truth that Zendaya masterfully brought to her performance. Emma was real, we just don’t know everything about her. Yet. There’s a lifetime of marriage for that.
Putting aside the funness and funniness of this film, difficult as it may be, we need to talk about its heart, especially as the controversy around The Drama continues to mount online. Understandably, as the film operates on a bait-and-switch hook and reveal, part of the work of selling the film is to mislead the audience at least a little. The film is categorized as a romantic comedy, though a quick watch of the trailer or glance at Borgli’s filmography might compel you to be a bit suspicious of this from the jump. Is it romantic? Absolutely. Is it a comedy? A Scandinavian comedy, certainly. Had the reveal been that Zendaya’s Emma once cheated on her SATs, perhaps this would have gone over without a fight. It wasn’t, though.
Advocacy groups like March For Our Lives have cautioned viewers about engaging with the film, though specifically criticizing the marketing of the film, positing that “conversation cannot begin and end on screen” when “something like a school shooting is treated lightly or played for irony,” and even asking “what kind of conversation is this meant to start?” Tom Mauser, the parent of a tragically murdered Columbine student, was outraged by the film’s press tour, specifically noting how Zendaya’s mirth and joyful attitude on the Jimmy Kimmel show trivialized and made light of the topic. Many are angered simply by the discussion of school shootings in any other context than a documentary or activism.
Honestly, I have friends with similar feelings, especially as we’re all of a generation where school shootings and mass casualty attacks have become almost normalised with American students doing Active Shooter and Lockdown drills in school, and others being surrounded by their stories in the news. Mauser feels that the film’s premise itself normalizes school shootings. The film’s marketing has kept Emma’s reveal as a gimmick to sell tickets. It risks, at the very least, triggering members of the audience who didn’t know what they were walking into, especially as the film does not shy away from the violence or horror of these incidents.
I won’t lie, and I don’t want to either. This film is absolutely a black comedy, and while I see the merit in these points, I do believe that The Drama is not only starting conversations but, as I see it, making a real case for the practice of radical empathy. As more and more characters struggle with Emma’s past, it becomes difficult not to feel sympathy not only for her current self, but also for her younger version, especially. I haven’t walked out of many (true) rom-coms thinking, and thinking critically, as much as I did after watching The Drama. And isn’t that exactly the point? Because we’re talking about it. And we’re talking about gun violence and advocacy. And we’re talking about empathy. This is the conversation! And you might be angry, and you might have hated the movie. But this is the conversation, so have it.
Watching a young Emma connect and open up to her peers for the first time after a separate tragedy is heartbreaking. It changes the trajectory of the rest of her life, and the lives of other students she might have ended had she gone through with the attack. As her circumstances worsen, I’ve found it increasingly frustrating and infuriating that she can’t find just one person to give her grace or love without conditions. Pattinson’s Charlie poses the question in the film: how many people around us, every day, surrounded by the aesthetics and the inundation of mass violence committed by teenagers, considered something similar and didn’t go through with it? Surely, we can understand that. Surely, we can have empathy for everyone who has considered something horrible and not done it. Can we even have empathy for those who have? I believe, yes, almost certainly.
In summation, The Drama is funny. It’s smart. It’s dark, and it will absolutely make you think. I believe it will make you love— just a little bit more than you did before.