The new A24 film “The Drama” (2026), directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, looks good on paper: It has a likable cast, great humor, engagement with social issues and a theme that extends beyond the generic plots romantic comedies often embody. All in all, “The Drama” seems to check many of the boxes that would typically appeal to viewers. Yet after watching it, I was left completely unfulfilled.
The film starts off how a romantic comedy typically would, with Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) portrayed as a happily engaged couple preparing for their wedding. But, during a wine-tasting night, as the couple and their friends play a game about the worst thing each person has done, Emma reveals that when she was 15, she had once planned to carry out a mass shooting at her high school, though she ultimately never acted on it. This sudden confession becomes a rupture in the couple’s relationship, challenging the strength of their love, their capacity for understanding and forgiveness and ultimately raising the question of whether their love was ever truly unconditional.
Based on my understanding, Borgli’s film seeks to interweave a set of major questions together, including whether someone guilty of even imagining an atrocity like a mass shooting whose consequences could affect an enormous number of people can still be worthy of grace, and whether unconditional love can survive when confronted with a revelation that fundamentally changes how one is seen. Yet, none of the questions posed in the movie is fully fleshed out in a cohesive way that helps the audience arrive at a central takeaway.
Whether framed as a question of unconditional love or of rehabilitation after violent intent, the story ultimately comes down to whether a person — in a romantic relationship or otherwise — ought to be permanently defined by the worst thing they have done. The film does not take a clear side, though it seems to lean toward the idea that one ought not to be, particularly in the end when Emma and Charlie give their relationship a chance to start over.
Yet, many of the plot choices seem internally contradictory. As Makens Joseph argued in his article in the Daily last week, “Emma’s motivation for planning the attack is left vague and underdeveloped, making it difficult to fully understand or evaluate her growth. Additionally, the film does not clearly show whether she has taken meaningful steps toward accountability, such as therapy or genuine reflection, which weakens the foundation of Charlie’s decision to continue the relationship.”
Joseph’s critique captures the central issue with “The Drama”: The film gives the audience little reason to believe Emma has undergone the kind of inner growth that meaningfully separates her present self from her past, beyond the surface-level portrayal of her as an amicable person. Rather, each time the shooting is brought up, Emma becomes defensive and dismissive, suggesting her lingering inability to confront her past with composure.
This contradiction is made worse when Charlie asks his coworker Misha about the worst thing she has done, to which she says committing infidelity. Immediately after, Charlie commits an act of infidelity with Misha (who, though not the initiator, fully reciprocates it despite also having a boyfriend herself) — suggesting that a person is, in fact, capable of repeating the worst thing they have done. In this sense, the film undercuts its own moral premise. It neither offers strong examples that one is fully capable of growing out of the worst versions of themselves nor constructs Charlie’s character in a way that gives the audience reason to believe he is fully capable of unconditional love despite not knowing whether Emma has truly grown out from the worst thing she has done.
Then, there’s the problem of mass shootings: the treatment of a theme with such emotional, psychological and moral gravity should circle back to some kind of evaluation of the issue, or at the very least take a firmer stance on what it means. But Borgli once again fails to do so, instead implicitly comparing mass shootings to Charlie’s infidelity, as if both characters having each ‘messed up’ provides grounds for the other to offer a second chance. In doing so, mass violence is reduced to a mere instrument for testing unconditional love. An issue that carries such enormous social implications should have a message of its own, rather than existing as a device in service of another theme that carries a much lighter weight — but the film never provides that message.
These competing issues run through the film interlocked with one another, yet none of them feels fully developed. A movie that productively engages with a ‘bigger picture’ issue should be able to challenge the audience to think more deeply about how that issue relates to them or how they understand it. Open-endedness should not mean forcing the audience to guess endlessly at what the story is trying to say.
As I found myself searching for every shred of evidence to connect arbitrary plotlines in order to force a cohesive moral out of this seemingly incohesive storyline, I couldn’t help but feel that “The Drama” failed to deliver on the qualities that initially made it look so promising on paper. In the end, the movie truly just feels like drama: messy, unfulfilling and unresolvable.
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