Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Drama, out now in theaters
Is it possible that I’m too woke? This is all I could think during the new A24-produced film featuring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. For those who haven’t yet been spoiled on the premise of this movie, read at your own discretion!
Emma Harwood, played by Zendaya, and Charlie Thompson, played by Pattinson, are set to be married within a week of the film’s start. They couldn’t be happier, and everything seems to be leading to a picture-perfect wedding. Obviously, for the sake of the viewer’s entertainment, it all must go awry.
During a rehearsal dinner, Emma’s friend Rachel, portrayed by Alana Haim, presses everyone to divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done. Emma is forced to reveal the worst thing she’s ever done. It’s worth noting that Charlie, her soon-to-be husband, cannot think of anything terrible that he’s done. When she was 14, Emma planned to stage a mass shooting at her high school. The vibe at the rehearsal dinner is instantly demolished. Rachel is horribly offended and makes it her goal to try to cause drama during the wedding.
Rachel’s entire existence is one of my main gripes with the plot of The Drama. The twist of Zendaya potentially being a school shooter was incredibly surprising, and that surprise mixed with morbid intrigue really pulled me into the story. Ultimately, the character of Rachel exists for the sole purpose of creating awkward moments where Emma fears her secret will be made known to everyone at her wedding.
The plot goes nowhere with what could have been a very interesting discussion about Emma’s teenage self and what brought her to that point. Her fiancé is very clearly disturbed by the news, and their relationship takes a turn for the worse. Charlie feels that he can’t look at Emma the same way after the reveal, constantly picturing her with guns. She continues to push him away, and they never end up talking about how she grew from that pivotal moment in her childhood. We’re supposed to believe that these two people were the perfect couple with the perfect marriage ahead of them, but they can’t even talk about something serious when it comes up?
Instead of exploring WHY someone would plan a school shooting, the writers boil the plot down to lukewarm tension over who will discover Emma’s secret. It’s shown that her teenage self was bullied and didn’t have any friends, but that cannot be all that amounts to a child wanting to commit an atrocity of such degree.
There are attempts at humor about her school shooting plot as well, which is what makes me wonder: am I too woke? Attempts at humor included things like teenage Emma’s recording of her manifesto getting interrupted by pesky software updates or background noise. I personally found it impossible to laugh at these “jokes” that make light of a very real problem in our country.
Personally, I don’t think that I’m too woke for the bland jokes that The Drama has to offer. I think they’re just in poor taste, plain and simple. In fact, I find the entire movie to be in poor taste. There are countless examples of directors and films tackling larger-than-life subjects of varying degrees of complexity; a recent example that comes to mind is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. The difference between The Drama and something like The Zone of Interest is that the latter’s creators understood what kind of movie it should be to address such a sensitive subject.
To attempt to make any movie about something as complex as a would-be school shooting is truly a Herculean task, and it’s clear that writer-director Kristoffer Borgli recognized this and opted to ignore this task altogether. It’s never revealed if Emma went to therapy and truly healed from the traumas that pushed her to her mass-murder plot. The audience must blindly accept that she’s changed entirely for the better, and all of the glimpses of her past that we get are sidelined by the brazen attempts at humor.
During the rehearsal dinner where they all learn Emma’s secret, Charlie brings up a good point. There could be thousands of people across the country who have thought of doing something similar to Emma’s plan but never carried it out. I do think there’s a conversation to be had about accepting someone like Emma into your life, given that proper steps were taken to ensure growth and change the person a person. Without any evidence that she did actually get help, the audience is simply left to assume one way or the other.
This fork in the road cripples any depth the movie could have had on the topic; how is the audience supposed to take the fractured relationship seriously with the bare-bones glimpse the film shows? I truly hope that this trainwreck of a movie, which does genuinely have a valuable subject matter, inspires other writers to take a stab at the core issue that The Drama almost addressed. It feels like every week, the United States is reminded that school shootings won’t just go out of fashion. I just hope the films that come out after this one treat the matter with much more respect.
Myles Arnott is a writer.
