It’s called “The Drama” and to be completely honest, the existence of this movie had barely registered with me. I’m definitely not the target audience. The target audience is young people who want to see a rom-com starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Here’s the trailer so you can get an idea of what the filmmakers are selling.
So you get the basic setup. It’s a rom-com with some kind of dark secret. In fact, the promotion for the film has been emphasizing that no one should reveal the secret or spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Promotional materials are vague. The studio, A24, has been working hard to keep the lid on: At advance screenings held before last Friday’s premiere, critics were asked to “refrain from spoiling The Drama until everyone has a chance to see.”…
But the official poster for “The Drama” mirrors the aesthetic of wedding romps like “Bridesmaids” or “The Hangover.” The two stars pose as a bride and groom for a ceremony that appears to have gone off the rails: She’s wearing an orange parka and looks irritated. He’s got a bloody nose and a dangling bow tie, in the style of a slapstick rom-com.
Here’s the poster they are talking about. It looks like a slightly darker rom-com.
New poster for Kristoffer Borgli’s ‘THE DRAMA’ starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. pic.twitter.com/uP6RyGb4na
— cinesthetic. (@TheCinesthetic) March 19, 2026
But the Washington Post has seen the movie and says they feel like the secret nature of the film sort of makes the marketing into a cheat. Because the dark secret Zendaya’s character reveals isn’t the usual rom-come misunderstanding.
Here’s your last chance to stop reading if you don’t want it spoiled.
The secret that really is the core of the movie is that her character almost carried out a school shooting. So this sort of becomes a movie about that topic.
Emma, meanwhile, confesses that she once planned a mass shooting.
You mean you fantasized about it, the other three insist uneasily, but it’s more than that: As a 15-year-old high school sophomore she stole her father’s rifle and set up target practice in the woods. She made a list of her intended victims, scribbling over their yearbook photos with red marker. She studied other school shooters and recorded a manifesto — and the filmmakers show her doing all of this.
The fact that Emma didn’t go through with the attack turns out to have been happenstance more than conscience: Shortly before her own planned assault, another shooting, at a nearby shopping mall, takes the life of a classmate. The school’s clumsy grief counseling ends up reaching teenage Emma, who is depicted as an awkward, unhappy loner. Before long, she’s recruited into an anti-gun-violence student group and the people she once planned to murder instead become her friends.
The rest of the movie is, needless to say, barely about a wedding at all.
The Post decided to spoil it because they think something this gruesome probably shouldn’t be a surprise for a bunch of teens who bought a ticket to see the Twilight vampire guy in a rom-com:
…no matter how deftly the subject matter is dealt with, this is still a situation in which a viewer would have walked into the theater expecting to see attractive lovebirds careening toward the altar, only to find themselves confronted with fantasy sequences of a mass-murdered wedding reception — the guests all slumped in their chairs, bleeding and riddled with bullet holes.
But clearly the surprise is the whole point of this. Get people to expect a fun, light rom-com and then hit them with a bloodbath and (I imagine) a lecture.
The film has a 76% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t terrible. As always, though, I wonder how many of the reviewers are giving this praise becuase they like the politics rather than the actual movie. Still, quite a few reviewers found the whole thing in bad taste.
This might be the first romantic comedy in history where a school shooting is used to set up a will-they-or-won’t-they. A bigger question is whether a movie structured around scenes of characters trying to talk things out has anything to say about its charged subject matter…
The Drama gestures at its own sort of social commentary by having Charlie—whether earnestly or in an attempt to save face, or both—propose to Rachel and Mike that Emma’s fleeting moment of psychosis was a by-product of the country she lives in, but the observation rings even hollower than it’s supposed to. The flashback scenes of Emma’s swamp-adjacent adolescence in New Orleans might as well be taking place on another planet, but not in persuasive ways; Borgli doesn’t have the attention span to create a lived-in portrait of exurban teenage alienation. Instead, we get swift, loaded little snippets—a lonely bedroom, a hint of racialized bullying, parents as a noticeable structuring absence—that could be unreliable memories or the work of a filmmaker leaning on shorthand. The same goes for the young Emma’s shift to gun control activism as an attempt to exorcise her demons, and also her stated curiosity about the “aesthetics” of gun violence. The latter serves largely as an excuse for shots of Zendaya posed curled half-naked in bed around an assault rifle.
Maybe it’s possible to make a compelling movie out of this gimmicky premise? But if so this director hasn’t done it. This review calls it an experiment on the audience.
Here, in the world of The Drama, everything is treated as potentially funny. In reality, not everything should be. The film raises compelling questions about accountability, forgiveness, and whether someone can truly move on from a darker, more troubled version of themselves. Does it actually want to investigate those ideas? Not exactly. Borgli apparently just wants us to laugh when we feel uncomfortable and snicker at the disquieting realities playing out before us…
By the end, this pivots from an examination of human relationships to more of an experiment in audience reaction. Overall the film feels disingenuous. And though it burns bright at first, it quickly fades into something cold and inaccessible – an uncertain, unsatisfying dissection of something that feels altogether inconsequential.
Or maybe it’s just a dumb idea in the first place, one that couldn’t be saved and wasn’t worth saving.
The intent seems to be to add a bold, tangy element to the rom-com, or at least to suggest a mordant commentary on our American condition. But the revelation isn’t either of these things. It’s just a downer, an inappropriate introduction of ugly real-world truths. It doesn’t belong in a romance (even one that aims to be edgy), it isn’t fun, and I suspect the reason the film’s distributor, A24, doesn’t want the secret out is because it understands that it will drive away a lot of people. A rom-com need not be a sparkling shelf covered with bon-bons, but it shouldn’t be a nauseating cloud of carbon monoxide that makes you want to flee…
Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.
Regular readers know I generally prefer to see for myself if something is as bad as the critics say, but in this case I think I’m just going to pass on The Drama.
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