Contains Spoilers for The Drama
Weddings are built on the promise of accepting someone completely until death do us part. A24’s film “The Drama” questions whether that promise is realistic.
The Kristoffer Borgli-directed film, starring Zendaya as Emma and Robert Pattinson as Charlie, is a controversial take on how love collides with difficult moral truths. Vulture titled it, “A dark-hearted, cringe-inducing romantic comedy with a sterile sheen.”
The storyline took your typical rom-com and added an all-American morbid twist.
When the bride drunkenly indulges in dark gossip, she is asked: “What is the worst thing you’ve done?” Emma admits to once planning a school shooting but backed out at the last minute.
From this moment, Charlie begins to privately ruminate on the moral implications of marrying someone with such a dark past. He argues, “Imagine how many people must have thought about it, though? It could be anyone.”
The film does a great job of displaying how violent ideation is common. It has become so common that it’s a trend in some communities, like on the internet and in chat rooms.
Overthinking led Charlie to miss so many details, like the racial bias shown towards Emma for being African American. She’s perceived as angry and violent, but throughout the film, she seemed to just crave normalcy. Emma consistently showed patience, grace, and humor, yet her rehabilitation was dismissed simply due to her skin color.
The film centers on the groom’s process of realizing the bride has a muddy past; he isn’t sure she has fully cleansed. His mind becomes a tricky rival, leading him to take actions with consequences for everyone around him. The film lingers in that uneasy space between love and resentment, where connection becomes tense, unpredictable, and quietly devastating.
A single past thought can feel almost as heavy as an action. Even though she abandoned the plan and changed her life, the ideation sticks psychologically like showing up in nightmares, in how others project fear onto her, and in the way her fiancé starts to reinterpret everything about her through that lens.
This was a fresh take on how much you could lose yourself in trying so hard to understand your partner. The loss of the perception that we have created of someone is harder than accepting the reality of who is standing in front of us.
The original score by the acclaimed composer Daniel Pemberton heightens the underlying tension that both characters try to suppress. When the background music suddenly stopped, the silence felt suffocating, as if it knocked the air out of the scene.
The Drama was rated 7.5 on IMDb, while Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77% on its Tomatometer.
The conversation surrounding the film included just how much we should know about the person we are dedicating our lives to. During the world premiere, A24 approached the stars to ask them just that.
“It’s impossible to know everything about someone … but it’s important to feel understood by your partner,” Zendaya said.
The Drama delivered exactly what the title called for. An issue blown out of proportion based on the theatrics of being human. While the film engages with topics like gun violence, it creates space for commentary on taboo subjects, particularly violent ideation.
