In 2024, the United States Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis, with the leading cause of death among American children not being illness but being shot. Every year, more than 4,400 children and teens are killed by gunfire, over 17,000 more are shot and wounded, and an estimated three million children are exposed to shootings annually. As staggering as those numbers are, A24 Studios unmistakably decided to look at the statistics and knowingly humanised a girl who almost added to that number, and how she found love anyway.
Underneath the wedding planning, the meet-cute and the cringe-comedy of two beautiful people having a very uncomfortable week, is a film overtly indifferent towards the tragedy it presides over.
The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson–markets itself as a dark romantic comedy, but the only thing being romanticised is America’s most devastatingly recurring crisis serving as a meagre plot twist. Over a wine dinner conversation about twenty minutes into the film, is the confession of Emma wanting to commit a school shooting when she was fifteen.
On the surface of it, it could have been digested as a movie about repercussions–what violence does to real people, real lives–a reckoning, perhaps. With a particular psychosis of a nation that has naturalised the massacre of its own children. Now, depicting disturbing psychology is obviously not the same as endorsing it, but satire has always been with a target, and The Drama doesn’t really locate one. Instead, it did precisely what American media does best with its most unconscionable tragedies, it asked you to absorb it. And then comprehend it as rather romantic.
Not only this, but the casualness with which the movie just did not issue a trigger warning before the movie or even in the trailer–a fact unreservedly reprimanded by March For Our Lives–divulges the calculation that they did not consider the theme grave enough to forewarn their audience. However, even if one looks past the blatant nescience about the importance of a warning, it is the fiendish nonchalance with which Emma’s revelation is subsequently handled, making the film’s moral indifference impossible to overlook.
When a character discloses something so catastrophic, you expect–you require–an edifice of pain sufficient to explain, if not to excuse, the abyss they were staring into. But what The Drama proffers instead is a single word: aesthetics. She wanted to carry out a school shooting for the aesthetics of it, because it looked cool. The admission, delivered so casually, is perhaps the most culturally significant moment in the entire film, one it does not appear to recognise as such. The other, more lucid explanation of it–she was bullied, her dad’s job asked them to move around a lot, she had trouble making friends–became nothing short of a redemption arc that collapsed into something almost farcical. It was a shrug extended to a girl that wanted to commit an atrocious act because it looked compelling. And when the plot follows through with the more important question, ‘Why didn’t you do it?’, the answer is delivered with equal indifference: because another shooting happened on the same day she planned to. What this conferred was a simple premise, that Zendaya’s character did not see the devastating weight of what she was about to take from her classmates and nor did her conscience feel the dire need to intervene. Even though the moral work became staged and circumstantial, some viewers might read this more generously, as a portrait of intrusive violence and adolescent alienation rather than an absolution of it. A film willing to sit with uncomfortable psychology without flinching. It is a legitimate reading. But a film genuinely interested in that territory would have stayed there and not moved on to a wedding and a love story.
It doesn’t stop there. This quietly dismantles any coherence her identity as an advocate for gun control held as the film inadvertently implies that since she couldn’t do it herself, she joined the other side. Her activism was not born out of genuine retribution but was an attempt of redirected impulse. Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was among the thirteen students killed at Columbine in 1999, said that leveraging such subject matter for a romantic comedy was ‘awful’, inherently humanising the perpetrators of such violence and normalising the shootings themselves. He is not a critic. He is not a cultural commentator. He is a father who has spent twenty five years carrying something this film treated as a plot twist.
And that is not a message you want etched out onto a predicament that America buries its children in, year after year, with a benumbing routine. The film just takes one of the most recurring failures of civilisation and makes it the most intriguing thing someone said over a glass of wine.
Three million children are exposed to shootings in America every year. In The Drama, not one of them has a name.
The Weight of the Platform
Now, of course, it would be reductive and wrong to expect Zendaya to be confined to the safe, perceptible work of her Disney origins–her choice of script is not up for a debate, really. But the argument begins with a more distinctively uncomfortable truth: whether she chose it or not, a considerable portion of her audience are children and young adults who grew up with her, who found her first on Disney channel, who followed her into Euphoria, and will undeniably trail to The Drama, too. The platform did not shrink when the material got darker, it came with her. And so, the responsibility followed too and the question now is whether anyone making this film felt it.
Zendaya has manoeuvred this kind of territory before, and in comparison, done it with considerably more caution. In Euphoria, she plays Rue Bennett, a sixteen year old whose drug addiction is inseparable from grief, from the particular heartbreak of losing a parent at a young age. With this, the show builds around an entire groundwork of consequence–friendships corroded, a mother worn down to exhaustion, and a body in slow revolt against itself. Even then, with a narrative that never made Rue’s addiction feel aspirational with consequences stitched into its bones, the show was not without its casualties. A 2024 study found that Euphoria’s influence, predominantly on its Gen-Z audience, was moulding their attitudes towards drug use in ways consistent with the show’s content. With effects still being detectable eight months after the final episode being aired. Zendaya herself issued a personal trigger warning before the second season, acknowledging, without being asked, the gravity of what she was placing in front of her audience. Euphoria tried, was scrutinised, and still left a mark. The Drama did not try at all.
Even the peer reviewed research on school shootings has established, with distressing consistency, that media depictions of mass violence do not simply inform–they have the influence to contaminate. The Columbine massacre, the first shooting to receive nationwide media coverage, became the most cited source of motivation for copycat attackers in the years that followed. Researchers concluded that it was not the gun accessibility but the media coverage, the name, and the face on every screen, that pushed the perpetrators toward violence. In the two weeks after the Parkland shooting alone, 638 copycat threats were directed at schools across America.
And here is what sits beneath all of that data, the thing no one making this film appears to have even remotely considered: the shooters want to be talked about. The infamy was the point. School shooters do not emerge from a vacuum, they study their predecessors with the devotion of disciples where the coverage, the cultural footprint is the reward the contagion effect runs on. When you make a film that gives the person who almost pulled the trigger a name, you are not commenting on the mechanism. You are participating in its broader culture of fascination.
Then there is Director Kristoffer Borgli, Norwegian, working at a remove from the specific textures of American grief, who appeared to have seen an interesting premise: the dark secret that stress-tests a romance. Without any personal proximity. He did not grow up doing active shooter drills and neither did he lose anyone to Columbine or Parkland. One could argue that this distance was precisely the point: an outsider’s detachment enabled a tonal dissonance that American filmmakers, too close to grief, cannot achieve. But it is this very distance that made this story feel like material rather than an open wound, which is precisely what A24–who absolutely should have known better–chose to green light. The outsider’s detachment is not the same as clarity in Borgli’s case, it is just the absence of the grief that should have stopped him.
Wedding For You, and a Funeral For Them
The end of The Drama does land on a note that suggests, maybe, everything boils down to love after all. One could, if feeling generous, extend the film a single concession–you are more than the violent catastrophising and detrimental imagining–you are not the worst version of yourself. And you shouldn’t reduce yourself to it. It is a reasonable argument and on a good day, compassionate.
There is Charlie, who occupies the rest of the movie’s running time trying to comprehend what the love of his life just told him. Who, in the end, arrives at acceptance, distilling the plot twist into something your fiancée could say out loud at a dinner and still be loved for. There is something genuinely worth sitting within that beat–the question of whether love can hold the full shape of a person, the one who stood at the edge of something monstrous and nearly stepped off. That is one of the harder things intimacy can be asked to carry. And the film is not wrong to ask it. But it mistakes Charlie’s forgiveness as a final verdict, personal absolution and political acquittal becoming one or the same. Love is not apolitical and neither will it ever be. Charlie forgiving Emma does not exonerate the culture that produced her, his love does not speak for the classmates she was prepared to bury. So the final question, how apolitical can love be? In The Drama, entirely. And the resolution is: she gets a fresh start.
This brings us to the question the film does not know it is asking, the one that actually would have made it interesting. The data on school shootings is not ambiguous: the overwhelming demographic of perpetrators is white men. The mythology of the American school shooter has been exclusively constructed around that image. The cultural footprint. The grim iconography. All of it. A white man confessing this across a dinner table would have landed inside a recognised archetype, in conversation with every name that has been turned into a cultural monument to male violence and its discontents. Borgli cast Zendaya instead. A black woman. In doing so, whether he fully understood it or not, he detonated the archetype entirely. Now, there is a version of that choice that is honestly radical, interrogating who gets humanised in American violence–who gets the complicated backstory and who is forgiven rather than just simply feared. The answer to that runs directly through the casting decision where Zendaya being cast could have been the most revolutionary thing a studio film did this decade. When black women are rarely granted violent interiority in mainstream media, the space historically known to be the exclusive territory of white male alienation, the casting destabilises everything an audience brings to this story. The film does not appear to know it did that.
And the interrogation never arrives. The film does not know it made that choice. There is something faintly worse about that, about a decision carrying that much cultural charge being made without the film having anything to say about it.
Emma gets a fresh start. The film gets a distribution deal. And somewhere, a family is still waiting for their child to come home.
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