Trigger warning: Mentions of gunviolence/school shooting and spoilers ahead.
At 6:15 p.m. on a Friday night, my friend and I took our seats inside the Chase Park Plaza Cinema for director Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama.” We had both seen the trailer, and we knew, broadly, what was coming: Emma Harwood (Zendaya) would reveal something so disturbing that it would fracture everything around her, most notably unraveling her fiancé, Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson). What my friend and I didn’t know, what the film initially withheld, was what that confession was.
For those unfamiliar, “The Drama” is a dark romantic comedy that hinges on a singular moment of disruption, in which “a happily-engaged couple is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding off the rails.” Like most viewers, I entered the theater with a couple guesses about what this confession might be. A fatal accident, perhaps a serious crime. It obviously had to be something scandalous. I could not have predicted that Emma would confess to the fact that, as a teenager, she planned to carry out a school shooting.
The revelation lands in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable event,a wedding tasting. Emma, Charlie, her maid of honor and “friend” Rachel (Alana Haim) and Rachel’s husband Mike (Mamaoudo Athie) sit around a table sampling food and wine. Borgli lets the scene linger here, giving seemingly small relationship dynamics more space to accumulate much greater meaning. Earlier in the movie, the couple had spotted the person they had hired as their wedding DJ using heroin on the street, which everyone now discusses at the tasting. Everyone in the group agrees that she should be fired, everyone except Emma, who argues that addiction doesn’t negate the fact that she could still competently perform her job.
From there, the conversation becomes confessional. Rachel presses Mike to share the worst thing he has ever done. He resists, seeming visibly uncomfortable and upset, but relents after Rachel threatens to tell the story herself. His story, that he used an ex-girlfriend as a human shield from a charging dog, earns him condemnation, especially from Rachel. Rachel follows with her own story, delivered with a disarming levity that only makes it more horrifying and uncomfortable for the audience. As a young girl, she lured a “slow” boy into a trailer in the woods, locked him in a closet and left him there overnight. When his father came to her house that night to ask if she knew where he was, she lied, claiming she had no idea. She explains that he was found by the police the next morning, after an entire search party was sent looking for him. Though she laughs as she tells the story, the others in the room are clearly discomforted.
Charlie’s confession comes after, and it is revealed that he cyberbullied someone so severely that, as he jokes, their entire family had to move. While we see the two white characters, Charlie and Rachel, casually tell their horrifying acts and write them off as playful childhood mischief, we see an uncomfortable racial theme emerge. The white characters in the movie,Rachel and Charlie, are seemingly held to a lower standard and face less scrutiny for their past actions than the black characters,Emma and Mike. Rachel polices and criticizes Mike, and later, Emma, where Charlie is spared.
Then comes Emma’s confession. At first, the others in the table don’t take her seriously, there is disbelief and laughter. Then recognition of her honesty, and Charlie becomes quiet. In contrast, Rachel erupts into a fit of screaming, making the confession a personal attack with herself as the victim, mentioning that she has a cousin who survived a school shooting who now uses a wheelchair as a result. Her outrage is immediate and unforgiving, and the overwhelmed and now intoxicated Emma, vomits on the table.
It is here that “The Drama” reveals its true subject. Not simply the shock of what Emma says, but the race-based asymmetry of how wrongdoing is received, processed and judged. The film puts more emphasis on how society responds to such acts, rather than on the act itself. Rachel and Charlie’s reactions to Emma’s confession don’t exist in a vacuum, they echo a broader pattern of selective empathy and moral judgment through underlying bias.
My own response tracked the film’s intended emotional arc. Initial horror gave way, slowly, to more complicated feelings. At first, Charlie’s fear and confusion towards Emma felt completely reasonable. In a scene where she is holding a knife after cutting fruit and he flinches, I flinched too. But his subsequent actions, his infidelity a few days prior to their wedding and his unbelievably humiliating wedding speech, reframed his character completely. By the film’s conclusion, the viewer’s feelings of empathy have shifted entirely away from Charlie and entirely towards Emma, the same person who was villainized in the beginning.
In the final scene, the couple sits in a diner, suspended in the aftermath of their wedding from hell. Emma, still in her wedding dress and a garish orange coat, carries the weight of being publicly humiliated by her new husband during his speech, seeming like a run-away bride. Charlie, bloodied and disheveled after being beaten by another man at his own wedding reception, is reduced to something smaller, something pathetic. And yet, even though Charlie humiliated her, even though he initially refused to overlook her past, it is Emma who extends near instant forgiveness at the diner. In the final scene, we see the kindness and empathy that Charlie speaks of in the initial draft of his groom’s speech to Emma, one that he later deletes, evoked.
Emma offers grace and forgiveness to a man who didn’t offer it to her, despite how much growth she exhibited. Which returns me to the question I was pondering in the theatre last night. Who, exactly, is the intended villain of this film?
For me, the answer points to Rachel, not because her actions are uniquely monstrous, but because of the moral framework she validates them with. She minimizes her own past while amplifying the failures of others. She demands accountability, only when she’s not the one being held accountable. No one interrogates her story, questions her motivations or criticizes her for her evil act. No one seeks to verify whether the boy she abandoned survived unharmed or died screaming in the closet. As reddit user legopego5142 pointed out “Rachel got closer to killing someone than Emma did.”). Yet Emma, who never acted on her worst impulse and spent years attempting to atone for it, is rendered unforgivable and worthy of only the most heinous public humiliation possible.
The film emphasizes Emma’s transformation with quiet persistence. After a mass shooting happens in her town, she becomes an anti-gun violence activist, surrounding herself with supportive peers and throws the gun she once intended to kill with into a swamp. The gesture is clearly symbolic. Personal growth and change is possible, but it requires communal support, not isolation and blame.
Meanwhile, the other characters operate within what can only be described as a well-known moral performance. As Reddit user vanwyngarden observed, they exist on a “holier than thou” trajectory, quick to judge the DJ, quicker to judge Emma, all white feeling self-righteous about their past.. Emma is the only one out of the four who articulates genuine remorse, the only one who frames her past as something to be confronted and acknowledged rather than excused as a childish mistake. This once again showcases how the white characters in the movie see themselves as above the people of color, for where their worst moments are laughed off as trivial, Emma is not given the same grace.
Borgli’s filmmaking choices reinforce this unease. The editing is abrupt, almost intrusive, mirroring the characters’ spiraling thoughts. The camera lingers uncomfortably close to each face, trapping the audience in a POV-like trance. Even the production design participates in this discomfort, the couple’s beautifully decorated apartment, adorned with artworks like “Shambolic Figure” by Tristan Unrau and “The Coming Storm,” by George Inness Sr., becomes a visual nod to the psychological disintegration of Emma and Charlie in the days leading up to their wedding.
“The Drama” succeeds as a film because it doesn’t leave the viewer feeling happy, or entirely satisfied. It doesn’t offer any moral clarity on who is right or wrong, it simply points out that the binary, black and white idea that perfect moral clarity exists is a complete illusion. What lingers is not the shock of Emma’s confession, but the question that follows: why are some people permitted to evolve beyond their worst moments, while others are permanently defined by them?
And perhaps more unsettling than the confession itself is the answer the film seems to suggest. Because it is not, ultimately, about the act, or Emma’s desire to commit an act of gun violence. It is about authorship, namely, who is controlling the narrative and telling the story. Who is granted the dignity of being complex and forgiven.
Rachel can laugh at her worst moment, Charlie can brush off his. But Emma, who didn’t follow through, who changed completely and evolved into a fervent activist against gun violence, is denied entry back into the society she once inhabited because her company refuses to forgive her.
What emerges is not simply a critique of individual hypocrisy that is ever present in today’s cancel-culture, victimhood society, but of an unfortunately broad cultural tendency. We speak fluently about redemption, but we practice it sparingly, if at all, and we extend grace unevenly, along racial lines. When confronted with someone who flips our sense of moral order on its head, we tend to exclude, rather than reassess and forgive.
“The Drama” offers its viewers no easy conclusion, and no definite villain. What it offers instead is a damning indictment: our belief in personal redemption and growth is conditional, our empathy is selective and the judgments we pass onto others are far less objective than we would want to believe.
