Well, yours portly is back at it today after a glorious Spring Break. It was busy, but the kind of busy I like—getting stuff done around the house and knocking out various errands without the drain of doing them after working all day. There’s still an immense amount of unpacking to do, but I can at least maneuver around my home office without sucking in my gut and performing pudgy pirouettes around boxes.
Writing, however, took a bit of a backseat to errands—and to Old World, the 4X strategy game that absorbed much of my waking hours in the waning days of break. I stayed up until nearly 2:30 AM Friday night/Saturday morning playing the game, and was reminded why I don’t do that anymore, as I was dragging the rest of the weekend. That said, I did finish my first campaign (still a tutorial, technically, but it was a complete playthrough without any gimmicks and with only minimal handholding from tutorial pop-ups), winning an “Ambition Victory” as Babylon. Granted, the difficulty was a couple of notches below the standard settings, which probably explains why I was able to focus on churning out generation after generation of philosopher-kings in a mostly peaceful playthrough. Still, I feel much more confident to tackle higher difficulties as I continue to learn the game.
Those self-indulgent updates out of the way, let’s get to the movie review! At the beginning of break, Dr. Wife and I saw the new A24 flick The Drama (2026), starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. I’d always thought that Zendaya was kind of a one-note actress, as her entire schtick was to gaze moodily into the camera with the same expression. The Drama disabused me of that notion (to be fair, though, that is how she played every other character I’ve seen her portray).
The film is billed as a romantic comedy, which is a bit misleading. The flick is comedic, but it’s black comedy. Dr. Wife and I found ourselves failing to suppress guffaws at some of the truly deadpan, downbeat, dark humor of the flick, which always makes for a good time.
Indeed, there’s apparently some Internet outrage (the worst kind of outrage) over this perceived bait-and-switch, as people go in expecting a film about a cute couple getting married and instead get a movie about a dark revelation threatening that marriage. Yes, that’s technically the plot of every romantic comedy—something unflattering comes out in the second act that precipitates in the male lead running to the airport before his girl flies off to The Big City—but it’s much darker and more psychological here—and realistic. The film asks, “what would you do if you found out something about your fiancée that is (potentially) deeply troubling just five days before your wedding?” It also asks us to consider which is worse: doing something that is mildly or moderately bad, or thinking about doing something truly despicable but not carrying it only due to external factors.
The titular drama of the film comes when Zendaya and Pattinson take part in a game with their two friends, Rachel and Mike (the matron of honor and best man, respectively). The quartet discusses the worst thing they ever did. Mike’s involved using an old girlfriend has a human shield against a dog in Mexico; Pattinson’s was cyberbullying a kid to the extent that the kid changed schools. The worst by far is Rachel’s: she followed a mentally challenged boy to an old camper in the woods and locked him in a closet as he freaked out. His screams to be released spooked her and she ran home, leaving him there overnight. When the police asked if she knew where he was, she said she didn’t, and the boy was only found by a search party.
That’s important, because Rachel clearly doesn’t feel remorse for what she did. She dissimulates, saying that she was “just a kid” (she’s around ten or eleven in the story, so old enough to know you don’t lock retaahded kids in campers and leave them to die). Keep that context in mind when [SPOILER ALERT] Zendaya reveals her worst action.
Zendaya’s character planned—but did not commit—a school shooting. Zendaya explains that she thought about it, but never did it. Thus, The Drama has been released. Rachel, the self-righteous Jewess, immediately condemns Zendaya, and invokes her wheelchair-bound cousin, the victim of a mass shooting, as justification for her outrage.
Note that of the three, Zendaya is the only person who didn’t do anything evil. She thought about it—she even planned it!—and was on the cusp of carrying it out. But news of another local mass shooting soon made her knowledge of the topic en vogue with the peers who once bullied her, and suddenly she was leading Parkland-style protests against mass shooting. She went from a mass shooter to a David Hogg (but more sympathetic).
So, Zendaya finds her potential marriage at risk. Pattinson, who portrays a serial overthinker, descends into self-doubt: does he carry through with the marriage? Does he back out? Mike encourages him to call it off; Rachel ghosts Zendaya, even though Rachel is supposed to be working on a project for Zendaya’s employer. That single revelation—and the seeming inability for those in the room to extend forgiveness for a crime that was never committed—threatens to unravel everything Zendaya and Pattinson have built together.
There is so much going on in this film. Dr. Wife and I spent most of the forty-five-minute drive home afterwards discussing it. It raises intriguing questions. To what extent are we capable of change? Are our baser instincts always lurking there, ready to creep back up if conditions are right (or wrong)? When is it difficult to forgive and move on? How do we do so in the face of objective and/or potential evil? Do people deserve redemption and/or a second chance? And so on.
The character of Rachel as the foil to Zendaya is interesting. She is objectively the worst person in the film, the most fair-weather of frenemies. She completely condemns Zendaya, then gets angry when Zendaya gets her fired from the work project because Rachel wasn’t returning calls or e-mails (further highlighting the messiness of combining business with friendship). She gives a snotty, passive-aggressive toast “praising” Pattinson for his capacity (hard-to-come-by) to forgive and his openness.
Pattinson himself isn’t much better. In his desperate obsession with what to do—heightened by the potential for further humiliation if he calls off the wedding at the eleventh hour—he makes a series of panicked, bad decisions that only exacerbate the situation, leading to humiliating climax.
The question of redemption looms large over The Drama. It struck me as a very Christian film in this regard. Thinking about a sin is, according to Jesus, the same as committing it in terms of its inherit sinfulness. However, actually carrying it out is a very different thing altogether. Did Zendaya “do” wrong by planning and preparing for a mass shooting? Yes. Does she deserve redemption? Well, none of us deserve redemption, which is why Christ Died for us. Because He Did, we can enjoy the unearned gift of redemption. So, Zendaya certainly qualifies.
Indeed, she could accept that gift even if she had gone through with it! All of the characters are able to accept redemption and salvation. Zendaya’s case is unique in that she didn’t actually do anything, and events transpired not only to foil her plan, but to wake her up from her nightmarish fantasy (her character even says, “it felt like I woke up for the first time”—or something along those lines). Sure, we shouldn’t thrown all discretion out the window—is there some element of that animus dwelling within her still?—but it seems pretty clear that she outgrew what could have been a lethal phase.
In this regard, the film reminded me a great of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976). Bickle’s social isolation (and what we would now call autism) leads to a thwarted assassination attempt, which turns into a bout of vigilante justice that saves an underaged prostitute. Had things gone slightly differently, Bickle would have been condemned (correctly) as a deranged psychopath; instead, he is praised (again, correctly) as a hero. Small moments can turn tragedy into triumph, and The Drama demands that we explore that tension.
Much of the meta-narrative around the film is that it’s wrong to portray even a potential school shooter in a positive light. Much of this commentary is likely due to the Left’s a.) fear of guns and their b.) inability to embrace redemption and forgiveness. On the former point, it seems that Leftists fear guns the way a primitive culture might fear a stone idol or a totem pole—the thing itself is the object of their fear and veneration, rather than what that people can do with that thing. On the latter point, the history of the modern Left is one of eternal struggle, a never-ending upheaval that grants no forgiveness unless you manage to stay on the “right side of history,” the definition of which shifts with the winds of fashion.
Appropriately enough, the film explores these phenomena indirectly. Pattinson recoils at finding a book called American Slop, which features scantily-clad babes holding guns. He seems afraid of the very idea of guns, which certainly makes sense in the context of the film. Pattinson’s character is also keen on meeting the invisible, constantly-shifting demands of social convention, worried more about how the couple will look doing their elaborate wedding dance than about supporting his bride-to-be.
One final note: having just gone through a wedding, Dr. Wife and I laughed about the cringe and ludicrous expectations of “wedding culture,” which is—to borrow a term from the Left—downright toxic. We avoided most of it and kept things very low-key, but it was eye-opening how little the actual wedding day is about the couple. We never really wanted it to be—we wanted to focus on the sacrament and miracle of God Bringing two people together into one, and to make sure our guests had a great time (reports indicate they did)—but we experienced a bit of PTSD (obviously, I’m using that metaphorically) from the craziness of planning for a wedding. Thank goodness that’s behind us!
Regardless, The Drama is an absolute must-see. It sparked hours of conversation and contemplation for us, while offering up some laughs and tenderness amid the tensions. Check it out!