THE DRAMA (2026) | Tune’s Review
The Drama is currently in theaters via A24.
The Quiet Question
I walked out of The Drama thinking I’d caught Kristoffer Borgli being a coward. Then I realized he was being precise.
Here’s what everyone misses about this film: it’s not asking “how do we talk about gun violence?”
It’s asking “what do you do when the person you love is fundamentally different from you in a way that terrifies you?”
And that’s a much harder question.
Charlie: The Foreigner in Gun Country
Robert Pattinson is playing a British immigrant who grew up in a country where guns are so culturally foreign they might as well be mythical.
He sees a woman at a coffee shop and lies about reading her book just to talk to her. She notices he’s pretending, and instead of walking away, she gives him a second chance to approach her honestly.
That’s the entire film right there.
They’re two people choosing to see the best version of each other, over and over again, until they can’t anymore.
When Emma tells Charlie she planned a school shooting at 15, his trauma is completely valid.
He’s not being irrational.
He’s a man raised in anti-gun culture suddenly learning that the woman he’s marrying had plotted mass murder.
That’s not a social awkwardness to mine for comedy. That’s a genuine crisis of understanding.
But here’s the thing Borgli is careful about: Charlie doesn’t actually have a moral high ground.
During the game where everyone shares their worst thing, Charlie talks about cyberbullying he committed.
Except he didn’t.
He made it up.
He lied to fit in, to seem vulnerable, to manage the narrative around Emma’s secret.
He’s masking just like she is.
He doesn’t forgive Emma because he suddenly understands her.
He forgives her because:
- He sleeps with Misha.
- He commits his own “worst thing."
- He realizes he’s also a liar and a coward.
Only after he’s compromised himself does he find the capacity to say: I choose you anyway.
That’s love in the real world. It's not understanding someone completely, but accepting them despite what you’ve learned.
Emma: The Psychopath Trying to Be Good
Zendaya isn’t playing a traumatized girl with a secret.
She’s playing a textbook psychopath who is desperately trying to live a good life.
She didn’t stop planning that shooting because she had a moral awakening.
She stopped because another student did it first and took all the attention.
She was bored, isolated, and wanting to matter.
When the adjacent shooting actually happened, she saw the devastation it caused. Not because she cared, but because she finally understood what the attention would actually look like.
Then she pivoted.
Hard.
Anti-gun activism became her new path to belonging, to community, to being seen as normal.
She buried the manifesto, sank the gun, and built a completely new identity.
She became what would make her acceptable.
This is why she ugly cries, and her friends (the select few) notice. Zendaya’s performance makes it clear that the cry itself is performative.
Emma doesn’t know how to cry naturally because she’s never felt natural emotion the way other people do.
She’s learning the performance of being human.
When she’s at her support group, playing with her classmates, it’s not because she cares about gun violence.
It’s because she finally has positive attention.
For the first time, people aren’t mean to her.. they think she’s wise. She’s found the logic: be anti-gun, and everyone will see you as good!
When she has that panic attack after admitting Charlie is her boyfriend, that isn’t about vulnerability.
It’s about the physical sensation of real emotional connection, and that's something she’s literally never experienced at 28 years old.
Rachel is shocked when Emma says Charlie is her first “anything” because normal people have felt things way before that point. Emma hasn’t.
She confesses the secret because she miscalculates.
She thinks it’s safe company.
She thinks they’re joking.
She doesn’t expect moral reckoning.. because psychopaths don’t readily feel shame the way normal people do.
They feel fear when their mask cracks.
And that’s what happens at the wedding.
...
When she pukes.. twice.. it’s not from booze.
It’s from terror that everyone is seeing her as not normal.
Her entire survival has depended on passing, fitting in, appearing acceptable.
And suddenly everyone knows.
And then, at the end.. she loves Charlie.
She encourages people to move forward and have fresh starts.
She tries, genuinely, to be good.
You can be a psychopath and still want to live a good life.
The film isn’t asking if that’s possible.
It’s showing it.
Rachel: The Antagonist (Not the Villain)
Alana Haim plays a woman who is not wrong, but who cannot be right.
Rachel locked a boy in a closet when she was a teenager and got away with it.
She ran, hid, and denied everything out of fear.
When she hears that Emma.. someone she doesn’t even know well.. planned to kill dozens of people, her reaction is visceral.
She has loved ones affected by gun violence.
Her moral reckoning is real.
But here’s the problem.. Rachel doesn’t know Emma.
She only knows Emma through Mike, who knows Emma through Charlie.
Rachel is the maid of honor to someone she’s not actually close to.
This is why Charlie knows about Samantha and Emma doesn’t.. because Rachel isn’t actually Emma’s friend.
She cannot nuance Emma because she hasn’t earned the trust to.
You can’t ask for moral grace from someone you’ve kept at a distance.
Rachel is the vitriol end of moral high ground, the kind that doesn’t want to consider exceptions because considering them would require acknowledging that the person in front of you is fully human.
And that’s harder than maintaining the righteousness.
Haim doesn’t soften Rachel.
She makes her insufferable.. the kind of woman I know in real life and avoid at all costs.
The fake liberal who throws a stone and hides her face because she’s insecure.
The perpetual victim who’s simultaneously a gaslighting hypocrite.
The Karen energy dressed up in progressive language.
And that’s exactly right.
What the Film Actually Does
The Drama doesn’t avoid the hard questions. It asks quieter ones.
It’s not “how do we prevent gun violence?”.. that’s too big for a wedding film.
It’s “what happens when you love someone and then find out they’re fundamentally different from you in a way that terrifies you?”
And: “can you forgive them after you’ve compromised yourself?”
And: “can a psychopath live a good life?”
And: “is it enough to just choose each other anyway?”
Borgli’s precision is in showing you that every character in this film is lying.
Charlie lies about cyberbullying.
Emma lies about who she is.
Rachel lies about knowing Emma well enough to judge her.
Mike lies about being in the middle (he’s not – he’s complicit).
Misha lies about not thinking about the shooting.
The wedding doesn’t get cancelled because everyone realizes they’re all liars and cowards.
It happens because they choose it anyway.
The Verdict
I was wrong about this film.
It’s not cowardice.
It’s the opposite of cowardice.
It’s a filmmaker and two lead actors willing to sit in the discomfort of loving someone you don’t fully understand, and to suggest that maybe that’s all love ever is.
- Plot: 6/10 – The structure is sound once you understand what the film is actually asking. It’s not about gun violence. It’s about the gap between who we pretend to be and who we actually are.
- Performances: 9/10 – Pattinson finds the desperation in privilege. Zendaya makes the performance of being human heartbreaking. Haim is insufferable on purpose. This is some of the best character work you’ll see this year.
- Overall: 7/10 – A film about masking, compromise, and choosing love despite what you’ve learned about each other. Quiet. Precise. Worth sitting with.
