The Drama (2026) – DRAAAAMA

Released: 10th July
Seen: 21st July

It’s sadly an unavoidable reality that the mass shooting epidemic in America has exploded in recent years. Considering that the only year in recent history where there wasn’t a new mass shooting every other day was the lockdown year where it was literally impossible for such an event to happen, it’s the kind of thing that needs to be talked about and dealt with in some way. Since it’s clear that political figures won’t touch it, maybe some piece of art will crack through and make an impact (It’s unlikely, but it could happen) so for a film to use a mass shooting as an element of its plot isn’t automatically the worst thing in the world… However, if it uses something so heavy in a careless manner, that can create some serious issues with enjoying a film… so yeah, there’s some issues with The Drama.

The Drama tells the story of a young couple planning their wedding, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson). During their preparation, they have a little drinking session with their best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and bridesmaid Rachel (Alana Haim). During their drunk discussion, they play a game where they each reveal the worst thing that they’ve ever done, and after Mike, Rachel and Charlie all reveal secret stories that ended in an actual human being getting harmed in some way, Emma tells the story about how she planned a school shooting but did not actually go through with it. This is deemed to be the worst thing any of them has done and creates a rift between everyone involved that leads to friendships ruined, people seeing Emma as a monster and a whole lot of other pointless drama that will culminate in the wedding from hell.

The Drama tries to play the events of this film as some kind of dark comedy, using elements like comedic misunderstandings, physical comedy and quick cutaways for punchlines all in service of some of the darkest jokes one could tell in this situation. Note that the keyword there is “TRIES”, it’s certainly making a good attempt at being darkly funny. There are occasional moments when it does get there (the awkwardness of Charlie’s wedding speech is kind of perfect as a twisted dark joke near the end of the film). Still, most of the time it really feels like they’re just failing at being funny and leaving us with this awkward cruelty that never feels quite right.

The central gimmick of The Dramais that Emma reveals she once planned a school shooting and that makes her fiancé and friends think the worst of her and slowly sends everything spiraling. This doesn’t work for many reasons, the core one being that Emma didn’t actually go through with the plan. It’s made crystal clear that she not only didn’t do it but that she was never going to be able to do anything, she couldn’t even practice firing the weapon at home without literally making herself permanently deaf. Meanwhile her friends admit to locking a mentally challenged kid in a closet for so long that a search party was assembled and using their girlfriend as a human shield to avoid a dog bite, while her fiancé admits to cyberbullying someone until they literally moved… but the film gives them a pass for actually harming people while they’re all dogpiling on Emma for a momentary horrible thought that she didn’t follow through on.

Everyone for the entire film acts like Emma not only planned a mass shooting, but actually did one and got away with it for years. Rachel just cuts Emma out of her life until the wedding when she becomes a passive-aggressive asshole, Mike basically doesn’t appear in the film anymore and Charlie starts having nightmares where Emma’s a violent sociopath and I think the film wants us to sympathise with him for this reaction. Sure, it also wants us to sympathise with Emma on some level (easy to do, she was horribly bullied and had a brief set of awful thoughts, it happens) but never as much as it wants us to feel bad for everyone else and I’m sorry, I can’t. All of Emma’s friends are dicks, her fiancé’s a dick, she can do better than all of them and it’s not fun to watch them lose their minds over something that didn’t harm anyone else beyond her. It’s like getting mad at someone for having a suicidal thought, it makes you a dick if you do it.

It does help on some level that the two leads are delivering some great performances. Zendaya is particularly good at exploring the nuances of this character and making her feel like a real person who had a brief dark period in her youth then grew into a better person. Pattinson also delivers quite an interesting performance as a guy who doesn’t feel like he knows his fiancée anymore. I may hate his character at times but that doesn’t mean he isn’t played spectacularly by the performer. Indeed, the entire cast does manage to somehow make this film feel incredibly watchable despite how there are times when the subject matter and the script lets them down.

The script kind of bounces between high points where you can almost see the concept working and then just bottomless lows where everyone behaves like insane people in a way that doesn’t make sense. Even in the strange heightened reality of The Drama, I can’t imagine how hearing “I was depressed and thought of a mass shooting as a kid, but now I’m better” could make you do half the shit that happens in this film. It never quite works well, especially when you keep bumping into the fact that it’s not even the worst thing that’s brought up in the inciting incident. Does the film ever grapple with that reality of how everyone is overreacting and acting better than Emma for no reason? Nope, maybe one throwaway line that they all brush off but Emma in particular never gets to call out the hypocrisy of it all.

The Drama is a film that clearly had an idea of what it wanted to do, talk about a tough topic and also do a twisted comedy about how learning things about people we thought we knew can change our views on them in a dramatic way but it just never quite works. It’s made watchable by great performances but beyond that, nothing really to offer. The film suggests that your thoughts are somehow worse than your actions, you could literally cause someone permanent injury and that’s fine compared to someone having a brief thought of something awful in their actual worst moments. It hasn’t got anything particularly important to say, doesn’t have anything particularly funny to do with the heavy topic it’s decided to play around in and doesn’t seem to even fully understand what it’s set up. It’s trying so hard to do something but whatever it’s trying to do, at the end of the day it just doesn’t do anything worth watching.