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This article contains full spoilers for The Drama.
Except for a few particularly illiterate trailer watchers, everyone going into A24‘s The Drama knew they were in for a bad time. The film stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as Emma and Charlie, soon-to-be newlyweds who fall apart after the former confesses that, as a middle schooler, she planned a school shooting, and only failed to complete it because another shooter launched an attack before her.
What follows is a cringe comedy as the couple and all their friends manage to make everything worse. Emma’s maid-of-honor Rachel (Alana Haim) takes offense at the revelation, which prompts her to get her friend fired, exacerbating tensions. Charlie continues to obsess over Emma’s confession, driving himself to the point that he breaks down and has a near-affair with his co-worker Misha (Hailey Gates).
And, yet, somehow, The Drama ends on a high note, promising a happily-ever-after for Emma and Charlie. Maybe.
Like writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s previous films, Sick of Myself (2022) and Dream Scenario (2023), The Drama deals with social judgments and mob mentalities, often portraying communities as irrational and cruel. However, by limiting its focus to a couple and their immediate friends and family, the film has more humanity and, thus, more compassion towards its characters.
That compassion is clear in the final scene, in which Charlie—still wearing his tux from the failed wedding earlier in the day and still showing signs of the beating he took from Misha’s boyfriend (Michael Abbott Jr.)—arrives at a late night diner. Before it all went wrong, he and Emma had joked about making the diner their first stop as husband and wife, which makes Charlie’s post-wedding visit feel pathetic. Even worse, Emma arrives shortly thereafter, a puffy orange jacket over her white dress, and ignores him to march to the counter.
Yet, after ordering her food, Emma plops down in the booth across from Charlie and introduces herself. The two share some awkward but adorable small talk, before giving each other warm, forgiving smiles.
Some may argue that the final scene betrays the black comedy that proceeded it. After all that Emma and Charlie have said and done to one another, how could they pretend that everything’s okay? But that reading reinforces the very behavior that the film has been critiquing.
Everything falls apart when Rachel, and then Charlie, refuse to forgive Emma for her plans. Borgli visualizes that change of mindset by taking Charlie’s P.O.V. throughout the film. Where we once saw Emma as Charlie first saw her, a kind and sheepish bookstore clerk played by Zendaya, we see her as he imagines her now, the awkward and militant kid ready to kill (portrayed by Jordyn Curet). Every time that Borgli reuses a shot from earlier in the movie and replaces adult Emma with school shooter Emma, he shows us how Charlie literally cannot imagine his would-be wife as anything but a killer.
However, Borgli also uses other visual tricks to remind the viewers that our memories and perceptions are unreliable. Throughout the film, even while he and Emma are still in love, Charlie will be telling his best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie, providing a welcome sense of calm to the proceedings) about some shared moment from the couple’s past. As he talks, Borgli will cut in shots of the two playing together, or of Emma giving him a loving smile. Borgli continues the practice later in the movie, but now he pairs Charlie’s praise of Emma with insert shots of her looking frightening or getting too angry over small things.
In these moments, The Drama illustrates the way people in a relationship edit their perceptions of their partner, both of the past and the present. At no point in the film do Charlie or Emma see one another as they are. Instead, they see each other as they want to see them, a fluid perspective created according to how they feel and need in the moment.
The film offers no firm objective truth for any of the characters stand, and even less for those of us watching the story play out on screen. For that reason, one could certainly argue that The Drama‘s last scene isn’t real. We could very well be watching Charlie’s fantasy, even if Emma is indeed at the diner, but brushed right past him.
Or, we could read the final scene as Charlie and Emma editing their relationship once again, this time to see the best in one another. Not unlike the ending of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), in which Joel and Clementine (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) understand that they’ll likely hurt one another again but still decide to stick with one another, the ending of The Drama finds Charlie and Emma committing to each other, flaws and all. They choose to see the best in each other, even if they know they’re bound to find the worst in each other again.
What is the actual truth of the scene? That’s up to you as a viewer. But the promise of a happy ending, or at least the attempt to have a happy ending, is there for The Drama audiences, if they want it.
The Drama is now playing in theaters.
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