The following article contains major spoilers for The Drama.
Imagine this. You're days out from marrying the love of your life — your absolute soulmate, the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your years — when a cataclysmic secret is revealed. One which threatens to upheave everything you've ever thought about them.
That's the basic premise of new A24 flick The Drama, which begins as a knowingly conventional spin on the wedding rom-com: Robert Pattinson's Charlie, a neurotic British museum curator, agonises over his speech with best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie), reminiscing on his first encounter with Emma (Zendaya), when he approached her in a cafe and pretended to love the novel she read. His words are crammed with expressions of affection, admiration, and obsessive desire; he's truly a wife guy, even if their manufactured meet-cute was a little weird. Later on, Charlie and Emma meet up with Mike and his partner Rachel (Alana Haim) to taste-test the wedding wine. After a few too many bottles, their hang turns into a provocative game, each of them describing what they think is the worst thing they've ever done.
At first, the transgressions they admit are pretty mild. When she was younger, Rachel locked an annoying kid – who may or may not have had learning disabilities — in a cupboard, leading to a mass search that, somehow, never got back to her. (She reassures her friends that the boy survived the ordeal.) Charlie admits to cyber-bullying a kid when he was a teenager. But then, a wine-drunk Emma delivers a confession that hits the table like an earthquake: 15 years ago, when she was a bullied kid at a new high school, she planned a mass shooting, even practising in the woods with her dad's semi-automatic rifle, deafening her in one ear. Rachel, whose cousin was left wheelchair-bound by a school shooter, flips the fuck out. Charlie refuses to believe it. Emma projectile vomits. The hangxiety is gonna hit hard.
This is the big secret of The Drama, concealed from its marketing campaign, which has largely parodied marriage rom-com conventions — the posters stylised like wedding invites, for example — while Pattinson and Zendaya have embarked on a press tour that has stepped around the film's dark heart. Nonetheless, since the first teaser dropped, taken from a scene after that catastrophic conversation, wherein the pair awkwardly practice poses for their wedding photo, there has always been the sense that something weird is going on. Those who have seen writer-director Kristoffer Borgli's earlier films, like the gnarly influencer satire Sick of Myself, know that he has a penchant for poking at social taboos. Some sort of provocative twist seemed inevitable, but you'd have to be a hell of a clairvoyant to guess this one.
On the one hand, The Drama is about a relationship being tested to its very extreme, and whether or not Charlie can accept the most malevolent of sins from Emma's past. But it's also asking broader philosophical questions of its audience: what are our red lines for forgiveness? Should a person who planned such an extreme, wanton act of violence — one of America's most profound sources of national trauma — be allowed to reintegrate? Perhaps more to the point: why shouldn't they, assuming they didn't go through with it? In the time since Emma threatened to mass-murder her peers, going so far as to record a comically macabre manifesto on her bedroom webcam, she has reformed to the extent that she became a teenage anti-gun activist. But the question remains as to why she stopped short: the film implies that she was put off by another shooting at a mall down the road, her change of heart inspired by its tragic ripple effects. But it's left ambiguous enough that we wonder whether she still has the capacity for such bloodshed.
So does Charlie, whose internal conflict is denoted by his nightmares in which his wife-to-be shoots up their wedding venue, and the way he fantasises about a younger Emma proudly posing with firearms. He relitigates other strange memories from their past: when she slapped him that one time in the heat of sex, was that actually indicative of the violence that remains in her heart? Borgli devilishly toys with this tension throughout the movie, the latter half of which is dedicated to Charlie's extended crash-out. In his volatile throes of inner conflict, he looks for reassurance from a female colleague, who tells him that she would report her boyfriend to the police if he revealed similar historical intent. And then he tries to have sex with her. Ironically, it is this secret that sows chaos on wedding day, culminating in Charlie being headbutted, and their marriage seemingly in tatters. That is, until Emma reunites with her bloodied husband at a favourite diner, the duo roleplaying their first meet.
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