A24‘s dark comedy feature The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, has already become the focus of debate, despite the studio’s efforts to conceal the film’s true subject matter from its marketing.
As revealed in media reports about the project that hits theaters Friday, writer-director Kristoffer Borgli‘s movie (spoilers ahead) centers on Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson), whose impending nuptials are thrown into jeopardy after the bride-to-be reveals that she planned a school shooting as a teen — and even took her dad’s weapon to school — but ultimately did not go through with it.
During a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Jackie Corin — co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the 2018 Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that took 17 lives — calls the film “an inevitable evolution in storytelling,” given how frequently school attacks are part of the cultural narrative.
“Gun violence, particularly in schools, is not just another dramatic device,” says Corin, who had yet to see the film. “Art has the capacity to deepen public understanding and create emotional clarity and awareness, but it can also flatten and distort reality, especially when it leans on shorthand or tries to make something more palatable than it actually is. With something like a near school shooting, even small tonal choices can shift whether a story feels productive or dismissive.”
The Drama is notable in that the film ostensibly aims to examine the mindset of an individual who would contemplate carrying out such a tragic event, but it plays the plot point partly for comedy. Mia Tretta, who survived being shot in the stomach as a student during a 2019 shooting at her high school in Santa Clarita, Calif., recently told USA Today, “A character planning a school shooting isn’t something that should be joked about.” For her part, Corin acknowledges that humor can be a way for audiences to process fear or grief and that this approach is not inherently inappropriate.
Jackie Corin guests at the Tonight Show in 2022.
Todd Owyoung/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank
“I’m a survivor of the Parkland school shooting that killed 17 of my classmates and teachers,” Corin says. “There isn’t distance from the subject. So when humor enters the frame, it can feel very different. Unfortunately, it’s also not even just people who have lived through this. It’s the millions of kids across this country who fear it every single day. So what might read as satire or tonal contrast to one audience can feel very jarring to another.”
When asked whether the casting of two glamorous celebrities — Zendaya and Pattinson — as the leads can grant a cool factor to the idea of planning a shooting, Corin quickly points out that this has been a worry of hers.
“That was my biggest concern upon hearing about the plot,” she says. “When you have someone like Zendaya and Robert Pattinson attached to a project, they both — separately, but also especially together — bring an enormous amount of attention and cultural weight. They are icons for a lot of young people. That can be a real asset if the project is handled with care, but it also means that the message reaches audiences who might not otherwise engage with the issue. It raises the stakes.”
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama.
Everett
The studio has opted to not acknowledge the shooting theme prior to the movie’s release, as journalists were instructed at advance screenings to not tease anything about the revelation for Zendaya’s character. In his review of The Drama for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Richard Lawson wrote, “It’s a deceptively simple dramedy of cold feet, of pre-wedding jitters, only given the stain of higher-minded, more piercing social inquiry. What Emma specifically discloses ultimately doesn’t matter.”
Corin notes that the stars not using their press tour to address anything related to the topic of shootings — with the press events mostly lighthearted and including chatter about the pair’s real-life friendship — has made it tough for audiences to understand why the cast felt that the movie was worth making. (“Definitely an interesting strategy — that’s a way to word it,” she quips about the decision to hide the shooting elements from marketing.)
“I hope that they use their platforms to talk about gun violence responsibly because they chose to play these characters,” Corin says of Zendaya and Pattinson. “I don’t think that the question is, ‘Should someone like Zendaya or Robert Pattinson be in a project like this?’ But does the project actually rise to the level of care that her platform brings to it?”
