Review of The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently started an 8-5 job and have been trying to reclaim my sanity and hobbies by finding fun things to do on the weekends and after work, and one of my saving graces truly has been my AMC A List subscription. I’ve always had one on and off throughout graduate school, and I recently reclaimed my subscription after a brief stint of thinking I was going to move to India (long story).

Sometimes the movies I really want to see aren’t included on AMC A List, which is sad, but I accept the reality of the situation. I get a ton of use out of this subscription despite that. On a slightly different note though, I used to work professionally as a film critic, which is very much a dying career, and when I would go to the film festivals I watched everything that really excited me.

A List is also an opportunity for me to go outside of my comfort zone. Recently, at the time of typing this, I’ve seen a handful of movies I don’t think I would have ever seen if I had to actually pay for them. I see so many movies throughout different states on A List that I basically make money off of AMC, rather than spending money. I have an entire spreadsheet for it.

Today’s A List movie is The Drama. I’ve been wanting to see this movie ever since I caught the first trailer, especially considering Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are quite the combo. I didn’t know much beyond the basic premise going into this, which is probably why some of the twists hit hard.

Let’s get into the review!

Charlie and Emma are about to get married, but when Emma reveals a major secret of hers one night, everything spirals.

The movie begins in a coffeeshop. Charlie, after ordering his coffee, spots Emma for the first time reading a book. As he watches her, he gathers the courage to walk up and try to chat with her, but when he finally does, she ignores him. Turns out she’s deaf in one ear and after she notices him there, they finally strike up a conversation.

They continue going out from that moment on, leading us to the present day where they’re in the week leading up to their wedding. As they debate the finishing touches of the wedding, one night they’re walking home and spot their DJ smoking heroin out in public on the street.

When they go to meet their maid of honor, Rachel, and her husband/the best man, Mike, Charlie and Emma bring up the heroin incident. The debate turns to firing the DJ, but Emma defends her by saying everyone does bad things. The group goes one by one and shares their bad things, but when they get to Emma she shares that she almost did a school shooting.

No one believes her at first, especially when she admits it’s why she’s deaf in one ear. Rachel gets extremely upset when she realizes this is real, as her cousin Sam was in a school shooting and is now paralyzed because of it. Charlie is massively shaken up by this revelation as well, and it becomes his new hyper-fixation throughout the film.

The next morning, as they discuss it, Emma tells Charlie about how she was bullied and depressed in that stage of her life, and she fell down the online rabbit hole of gun communities. She only stopped her plan, despite meticulously practicing with her father’s rifle, when another mass shooting happened nearby and killed a classmate.

Seeing how her classmates reacted taught her a lesson there, and she ended up joining the anti-gun groups on campus and becoming an activist. Charlie accepts this in the moment, but as we see not long after he can’t stop thinking about and seeing Emma as a different person. Emma also starts being really upset by this, especially when Rachel stops responding to her and Emma gets her fired from a project.

This is shown psychologically through Emma’s nightmares of all of their wedding guests dead of a shooting, as well as how Charlie keeps editing out certain phrases of his wedding speech. After Rachel finds out about Emma getting her fired, she withdraws from the wedding and friendship completely, leading Charlie to lie to Mike and Rachel about Emma’s past in an attempt to bandage things up.

He also talks to Sam on the street awkwardly, freaking her out, despite assuring her she should love Emma. At the Cambridge Museum, where Charlie works, he asks his coworker Misha about a hypothetical situation about what she would do if her boyfriend debated a school shooting, and when she says call the police, Charlie reacts poorly.

When Misha asks him what’s up, he kisses her frantically and rips open her shirt. They both stop and agree not to tell anyone about this, and he goes to fire the DJ with Emma after this. He’s tweaking out during that, especially when the DJ asserts her innocence, and Emma ends up firing her.

The ext scene is the wedding. When everyone sits down for the reception, speeches begin, and Emma starts acting increasingly bitter. We get to her speech and she basically puts down Emma for being a different person than she expected, then snarks on Charlie for going through with marrying her.

When Emma goes to the bathroom, she hears Misha discussing a school shooting. Emma grabs Charlie and tells him that people are talking, then brings Misha into the room. She admits to what happened immediately, and Emma is completely and utterly shocked that Charlie pretty much cheated on her days before the wedding.

It’s time for their speeches after that, and Emma refuses to give hers. Charlie forgets his and gives an awkward ramble where he says Emma has done nothing wrong, then apologizes for his affair with Misha in front of everyone. That sets her boyfriend off and he attacks Charlie, Rachel and Mike stop and banish him from the wedding, and Emma wanders off into the night.

Charlie goes home covered in blood, looking for the missing Emma. He ends up at their favorite diner and orders a cheeseburger and drink. When Emma shows up and sits across from him after ordering, he breaks down crying. She starts the game where they act like they’re meeting for the first time again.

Overall Thoughts

A24 tried really hard to keep the twist for this movie under wraps, and I had no idea about what it was really going to be about until we got to that drinking scene and Emma revealed her secret. That was not the twist I was expecting and it really did set the tone of the entire movie.

I think everyone but Mike is unlikeable in this movie to some extent, with others being more unlikeable. Charlie really got a taste of American culture with this scenario, and I did also agree with him when he said this is a problem in America. Emma fell down the rabbit hole because of online communities revolving around guns, which is such a unique problem to the US that it feels alien to anyone not within this culture.

It’s also really easy to romanticize guns and the amendment that protects it until it impacts someone in your life, which is why Rachel’s perspective is also valid in that sense (I do think she’s the worst of the bunch). People in this movie just need to learn to communicate—how Rachel acted when she found out Emma became an anti-gun activist is so ridiculous, as it shows that Emma was capable of change and Rachel refuses to see her as anything but a monster.

Anyways, this was a compelling movie but not for everyone. I was shocked at what some people laughed at during the movie, as some of those lines about school shooting were not attempts at humor at all. It’s interesting how audiences react to certain things—I find it teaches me more about our communities and how they perceive things.

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