The Drama - A Commentary

“Should you know everything about your partner before you get married?”

A24/IMDb

Major spoilers in this commentary. Please go watch the film before reading this! 

Star actors, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson sit with The New York Times Podcast, promoting the new A24 film The Drama, directed by Kristoff Borgli. The aesthetic of this interview holds a haunting similarity to Dr. Orna Guralnik’s hit show Couples Therapist. The interviewers measured tone and probing questions - “Should you know everything about your partner before you get married?” coupled with, “Can you unpack that for me?” and “Where do you feel that in your body?” genuinely made my skin crawl. Pattinson’s sardonic attitude and Zendaya's clean PR trained responses intrigued me - they neither engaged too deeply with the questions, nor did they reject them. It exposed the film to be more than your average couple drama with affair tropes or mid-life crises. I admit I have not really seen any of Zendaya and Pattinsons hit TV shows and films (yes including the Marvel and DC films). I figured this film would be the right entry point into their character driven work.

The premise of the film revolves around Charlie and Emma, a thirty something engaged couple, who a week before their wedding, learn a devastating secret that has them questioning their reality. You will laugh, have a few jump scares, and ultimately be left with harrowing questions about the limits and capacities of relational empathy. 

A24/IMDb

One night, among the reverie of wedding preparation, Charlie, Emma are out with their couple friends for a last food tasting. After a few bottles, the group stasrts a never-have-I-ever style party game, with each person sharing the worst thing they’ve ever done. Some confessions are embarrasing, morally questionable, and cowardly, with varying degrees of residual guilt or comedy to cope. Emma is the last to share, and in a dissociated drunken haze, she confesses to have planned a mass shooting when she was 15. She had brought her fathers rifle to school, but on the same day she planned her attack, another shooting in a neighbouring mall took over the school's attention, and she decided to not go through with it. 

We see the miscalculation of this confession in real time. This isn’t your mid-range childish prank, teenage bullying, or adult cowardice. The couple recoil slowly in horror, Charlie is in disbelief, and after reactions start to increase in volume, Emma projectile vomits at the table. 

Charlie reels from this life altering news in the subsequent days. The surrealist macabre leaks through Charlie’s grotesque visions of Emma's teenage ideations morphed with the women we see today. You feel like you are experiencing a form of insomnia. He wants to leave. He wants to stay. He wishes others didn’t know. He tries to gain some understanding by psychonalyzing her childhood, and is left unsatisfied with what he learns. Nothing makes sense, and the timing is awful.

We start to see the cracks in the facade that Emma has constructed. The white lies, the avoidance, the need for control, Emma isn’t being as forthcoming as we would want her to be. And that creates so much tension in the viewer.

What struck me about this film was the well constructed dark comedy. Alongside Charlie, we are shouldering an anxiety as to whether or not Emma is, using the language of the film, a secret psychopath. The director navigates this feeling by letting us have moments of reprieve. Like trying to fight laughing at a funeral, you are left with an awkardness of experiencing levity when juxtaposed with the topic at hand.

School shootings are a harrowing reality for educators, especially in the United States, and it is understandable why some may think this film is attempting to humanize the perpetrators and not centre the victims. But I don't think that the film does that. It balances entering the world of a troubled teen without sensationalizing her depression. The film centres the present perceptions, experiences, and feelings of those around Emma as they reckon with the multiple layers of pain caused by the mere idea of a loved one causing unimaginable harm.

There is an acknowledgement that with positive community and a sense of belonging, teenage Emma exits this dangerous chapter of her life. But what about now? Is she really okay? Is this the equivalent of a garden growing around the buried body? We don’t know. We don’t know Emma. 

A24/IMDb

I notoriously watch one good film every 3-5 years. Film is a harder medium for me to digest than literature. I am left with a gnawing sense of foreboding along with endless questions running through my mind from watching this film. It is rare that a film enters my psyche this deeply. I had a student comment the other day, without missing a beat, that I needed to get some sleep, because I was hallucinating. This was after thinking I saw a mouse scitter across my classroom and I yelped dramatically. I dont think its interconnected, my school does have a mice problem, but hey - I did feel a little overly jumpy that day.

This film poses interesting questions, not least about the American school system, gun violence, and mental health, but about whether we are prepared for the full psychology of the people that we love. Can we digest every secret, prejudice, moment of selfishness, cruelty, or lack of contrition? Are we prepared to know it all? What do we do when we find out something that is at odds with our values?

Can we ever truly know anyone?

Such harrowing questions are laid bare like sparking wire.