The most twisted film of the year is also the most romantic. That dichotomy is what makes Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s first of many onscreen collaborations so controversial.
Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama has gone viral for its subversive take on the dark comedy romance genre… by adding in an early reveal that Zendaya’s seemingly sweet literary editor character, Emma, was almost a school shooter.
That “almost” is key. Awkward teen Emma didn’t go through with her planned massacre only because there was another local shooting at the mall the week she was preparing her attack, and she didn’t want to seem derivative. This irony is what makes The Drama anything but derivative, speaking to a distinctly American crisis that has plagued the country for decades—and one that is only gaining momentum thanks to the current presidential administration.
The Drama itself is not tone deaf in this political climate as some critics – and even a gun control activist whose son was murdered in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre – are alleging. Instead, the film resonates during an era in which listening to those in pain is rare, and isolationism—or, the “loneliness crisis”—is considered to be an epidemic along with gun violence.
At one point, Pattinson’s Charlie attempts to defend Emma’s past to their friend Rachel (Alana Haim) after she shares that her cousin became wheelchair-bound after surviving a school shooting. Charlie points to the prevalence of mass shootings as distinctly an “American problem,” and he’s not wrong.
There have been more than 300 school shootings in the United States since January 1, 2009, which is almost 60 times as many shootings as fellow G7 economic powerhouse nations Canada, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and the U.K. combined. In fact, there was an average of one school shooting per week for the first half of 2018, the same year that saw the devastating Parkland, Florida massacre that left 17 people dead. In January 2023, the U.S. even saw a six-year-old boy bring a gun to his elementary school in Newport News, Virginia, shooting his teacher in a premeditated murder attempt to retaliate for her reprimanding him.
Emma is written with empathy, a victim herself of an uneasy childhood. She describes herself in hindsight similarly to the 2022 shooter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, who killed 19 kids and two teachers in one of the deadliest gun-related massacres ever.
That 18-year-old gunman was said to be “a bullied loner with no criminal history” in a CNN report, with one of his former classmates saying that he “would get severely bullied and made fun of a lot” for his socioeconomic status. “People would actually call him a school shooter and stuff like that,” the fellow male classmate said to CNN. That shooter also bragged on social media about purchasing two AR-15-style rifles, just like Emma does in The Drama.
And like the 14-year-old killer at the Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, in 2024, Emma too idolized the power that she would have if she threatened her peers with a rifle. That shooter had a “shrine” of photos of the Parkland, Florida high school shooter on his bedroom wall.
Zendaya contextualized her character’s mental health struggles in the production notes for the A24 film, saying that Emma is “someone who is desperately seeking to belong and fit in. From childhood she’s been somebody who never quite found their tribe or community,” adding that the character experienced “intense” and “severe life changes” before the events of The Drama take place.
The flashbacks to Emma in high school, set in suburban Louisiana circa the mid-2010s, have the looming 2016 presidential election as an unspoken backdrop. Of course, as we know, Donald Trump won with the National Rifle Association donating more than $30 million to the Trump campaign. Trump later cited his years-long dedication to the NRA during his 2024 bid for reelection, saying during the GOP primary that while there was “great pressure” on his administration to limit gun accessibility amid the historic rise of shootings across his four years in office, he proudly “did nothing.” “We didn’t yield,” Trump said in February 2024 at an NRA expo via CNN.
For Emma, a teenager during Trump’s first administration, it makes sense for her to aspire to the images of American flag bikini-clad women holding weapons – even with the sexualization of U.S. senator gun activists on social media – that became synonymous with a gendered, Western, white Republican ideal amidst a redefinition of the male gaze in the MAGA era. Emma tells her fiancé Charlie that she was intrigued by the “aesthetics” of a school shooting, with women carrying weapons being deemed aspirational. The timelines imply that Emma was in high school while Harmony Korine’s iconic 2012 film Spring Breakers made guns the go-to sex toy and presciently predicted the Trump-led fetishization of guns.
The “aesthetics” of school shootings is further echoed when a present-day Charlie receives a book of photography featuring lingerie-clad models sensually holding guns in perverse poses. It’s only then that Charlie becomes most overwhelmed—arguably not by Emma’s past, but by the American cultural obsession with guns, power, and sex. This realization underpins the romance of the film, but it also acts as an apology of sorts for Emma and perhaps even those who were swayed by President Trump and are now speaking out against him, such as politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, celebrities like Andrew Schultz, and even Trump’s own constituents who voted for him three times.
The decade between Emma flirting with being a mass murderer, finding community in high school gun control activism, and later becoming a working adult spans both Trump administrations and hundreds of school shootings. Emma has changed, but our country hasn’t The glorification of guns in the zeitgeist remains. Charlie later asks at one point why no one considers those who almost became mass shooters. Surely not everyone who has thought of it has acted on it, especially when women are statistically less likely to be the perpetrators.
“We all carry parts of ourselves that we keep hidden. Secrets, mistakes, fears—things that we worry might change how others see us, even though they fundamentally shape who we are,” writer-director Borgli said of his film. “Polite society is an affluent and privileged existence where violence can creep in in unexpected ways. We’re constantly walking on eggshells over where our moral lines are drawn in our relationships — it feels very risky today to share deep truths with anyone… That tension fascinates me.”
While Emma perceives the would-be shooting as “mere childhood recklessness,” The Drama is much more nuanced than that. Haim’s character, Rachel, is the crux of the feature’s counterargument. Yet, instead of being the audience avatar or an overtly morally correct voice of reason, Rachel is whiny at times and seems out of touch. She’s also the source of the best darkly comedic moments, with a performative liberal-Karen characterization.
“Rachel is an important character because she can’t forgive Emma’s confession from her past,” Borgli said in the press notes. “How do you forgive an adult who may or may not have behaved in a certain way as a child? Should you put this scarlet letter on them for the rest of their lives?”
The Drama team anticipated controversy, with the production notes already prepped to address possible backlash.
“There’s going to be a lot of interest around what Emma’s big revelation is in the movie,” Zendaya said. “And while I think that revelation is important and pivotal, it’s about so much more than that. The Drama is an emotional rollercoaster without a clear-cut happy ending or resolution—every time I see it with family and friends, there’s a long conversation afterwards about Emma’s plight. You will have debates about love, acceptance, morality. There’s so much in the movie to talk about and wrestle with.”
We certainly have more to wrestle with in this country than any of this Drama. The film serves as a unique time capsule, capturing America in a period of transition, just as Zendaya’s Emma confronts her next phase: forgoing the freedom of singledom to get married.
With a Norwegian filmmaker and two U.K.-based stars, The Drama seems to require that outside perspective to remind Americans why we need to grow up as a nation and learn from our not-so-distant past mistakes of glorifying the most rudimentary understanding of freedom.
