The secret Emma divulges is dark. Mariana Trench dark. She explains that when she was 15 years old, she planned to commit a school shooting, going as far as to bring her father\u2019s rifle into her high school before an abrupt change of heart. Charlie and his friends are scandalised. (Audiences too have been scandalised: in the build-up to its release, The Drama faced vocal criticism from anti-gun activists<\/a>.) The twist, devised by writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, is reasonably effective as a dramatic catalyst, and, perversely, as a comic one. Pattinson\u2019s character, destabilised by the realisation that he may be about to marry a would-be terrorist, spends much of the film neurotically spiralling, with increasingly wild results. At this wedding, the honeymoon period is over before the vows. <\/p>\n Now, The Drama is not really a film about school shootings. But the subject\u2019s invocation was always going to dominate the conversation \u2013 particularly when it\u2019s presented as it is, in narrative-bombshell form. There becomes, inevitably, an onus on the film to deliver not just seriocomic entertainment but meaningful social commentary. That it fails to do this falls squarely on Zendaya\u2019s character.<\/p>\n Emma, you see, is an enigma. Charlie cannot read her, and neither can we \u2013 this is very much the point. The details of her flirtation with mass violence are confounding and opaque: the bullying that supposedly drove her towards it seems relatively banal (name-calling, jostling, but not the sort of psychological torment that is so often unearthed in real-life school-shooting cases). Moreover, her decision to abandon the planned attack and adopt a position of anti-gun advocacy is motivated less by any evident contrition and more by random whim.<\/p>\n By the present day, has she changed? Is she a meaningfully different person from her gun-loving teen self? These are the questions that ought to form the crux of Charlie\u2019s moral dilemma, but Emma gives us nothing by way of answers. So they just hang there. Zendaya\u2019s character hardly seems riddled with remorse or complex lingering pathologies. Perhaps this is in itself a satirical point \u2013 the idea that America has become so inured to gun violence that even school shootings are now part of the prosaic and unstimulating everyday, requiring no extraordinary evil or fanaticism. But on a narrative level, it creates a void. Zendaya isn\u2019t playing a character; she\u2019s playing a thought experiment.<\/p>\n None of the characters in The Drama are particularly multi-dimensional, but most are easy to parse \u2013 skeletal personalities blobbed with enough backstory to make them appear vaguely human-shaped. There\u2019s a logic to them, even in their contradictions. We know that Charlie is dishonest, when it serves him \u2013 he lies about reading a book to land a first date with Emma \u2013 but that he has enough shame to later admit the truth. We know that the maid of honour Rachel (Alana Haim) has a mean, irresponsible streak, but a staunch disgust when it comes to Emma\u2019s school-shooting fantasy. One of The Drama\u2019s best-executed scenes sees Charlie interact with his colleague Misha (Hailey Benton Gates); over the course of one conversation, we glean her ambient self-hatred, which then quickly manifests in messy sexual acquiescence. All these characters are more intelligible, more real, than Emma is ever allowed to be.<\/p>\n This sort of stubborn wooliness does not serve Zendaya\u2019s strengths as an actor<\/a>, either. The 29-year-old can be a terrific presence with the right material<\/a> (Challengers and Dune: Part Two, for eg), and she\u2019s one of the only young actors around who seems to have legitimate box office clout. (The Drama made back its budget within the first week, which testifies to that.) Hell, she was even undeniable in Marvel\u2019s Spider-Mans, as the laconic, thoroughly modern MJ. There, it was a case of doing a lot with a little \u2013 in The Drama, she\u2019s given a lot and instructed to do nothing with it.<\/p>\n In this way, it\u2019s easy to agree with the film\u2019s detractors. By stripping away the psychological realities of mass violence, The Drama ends up unavoidably diluting it. Is this gross insensitivity or fair artistic licence? That\u2019s up to interpretation. But then, in The Drama, so is everything else. <\/p>\n \u2018The Drama\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-519695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Something](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/zendaya-the-drama.jpeg\")
Something new: Zendaya in \u2018The Drama\u2019 (A24)<\/p>\n![\"Something](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/zendaya-the-drama-2.jpeg\")
Something blue: Zendaya in \u2018The Drama\u2019 (A24)<\/p>\n