I’ve always been a little sensitive about films that depict school shootings. But Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama was an outlier.
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama.(A24)
When the clock struck midnight on May 1, the far-right conspiracy website Infowars went offline with a whimper. The organization was dissolved after multiple successful defamation lawsuits were filed against its founder, Alex Jones, and eventually no one could pay the $81,000-per-month rent for the website’s studio space. Jones owes more than a billion dollars after he spent years claiming that the deadliest K-12 shooting in history was a hoax perpetrated by the government to promote the passage of strict gun-control laws. The victims’ families were subjected to relentless harassment and death threats by Jones’s followers, who believed that they and their dead children were “crisis actors.”
Neither my blood pressure nor my sanity can countenance the conspiracy theories that hucksters like Jones peddle as if they were dietary supplements or survivalist supplies. But as much as the Sandy Hook truthers are blinded by hateful ideology, I have to believe some of their fervor stems from how bewildering that particular tragedy was. School shootings are as endemic to 21st-century America as the common cold: Roughly 233 of them occurred last year, though that number isn’t definitive, since there is no standard definition of the term “school shooting.” But even taking into account our acquiescent gun culture and the current adolescent mental health crisis, the mere idea that someone would shoot 20 6- and 7-year-olds with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle can short-circuit even the stablest of minds.
I have been prone to depression for most of my life, and I have managed it, sometimes more successfully than others, with self-medication and irregular emotional support. Hence, my depressive periods tend to blend together in my memory. (Frankly, they aren’t severe or notable enough to be worth remembering at all.) But the months following Sandy Hook were a different story. The shooting happened at the tail end of finals during my sophomore year of college. I had plenty of time to absorb, and be affected by, the tributes and debates that took place throughout the winter break and the subsequent spring semester.
I felt vaguely embarrassed by how affected I was and brushed off queries from my friends about my low mood. I had no personal connection to anyone who was killed. I didn’t even have younger siblings whom I could project my secondhand grief onto. I suppose part of the reason I was so unnerved by the whole affair was that I knew in my heart that nothing would change, culturally or politically, in its aftermath. Sure enough, those forebodings were confirmed when numerous states passed laws that weakened gun restrictions in the months after the shooting. If 20 dead kids weren’t enough to alter the terms of the gun-control debate in this country, then the debate was over.
My distance from the incident could not heal my raw nerves. I remember my mother offhandedly mentioning that, since it was two weeks before Christmas, the victims’ parents almost certainly had presents for their kids already stashed away in their homes. The heartbreaking banality of that statement undid me like a zipper.
The first time I was first paid for my writing was in my junior year of college when I reviewed a David Spade standup-comedy special for The A.V. Club. It would be another few years before I could call myself a film critic. I settled instead for developing an inchoate cinephilia.
Like most burgeoning cineastes, I embraced a permissive attitude toward on-screen violence as an outgrowth of a generally progressive view of art. But even as a young man, I found it distressing to watch depictions of children getting gunned down to manufacture drama. I remember barely being able to stomach Battle Royale (2000), a pre–Hunger Games dystopian action film about junior-high-school kids who are forced to fight one another to the death by their authoritarian government, when my college roommates screened it in our apartment. Years later, I was asked to review Paul Greengrass’s 22 July (2018), a docudrama about the 2011 domestic terrorist attacks in Norway, and I distinctly remember thinking that the film offered nothing substantial enough to justify its graphic recreation of those brutal events. I have similar difficulties with films I otherwise adore, like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), in which an unproductively sour taste floods my mouth when a gunman’s bullet blasts through a little girl’s vanilla ice cream and into her chest, leaving her covered in blood.
My fragility around this issue has compounded in recent years as contemporary cinema reflects the normalization of wholesale slaughter as a hazard of American life. Vox Lux (2018), for example, capitalizes on the trauma of mass shootings to lend sociocultural heft to a rudimentary exploration of contemporary celebrity. The weakest shot in Weapons (2025), a supernatural-horror film about 17 children who mysteriously disappear, features a nightmarish image of an assault rifle eerily floating in the sky, cheaply summoning a tangible source of terror as a vehicle for narrative ambiguity. The specious evocation of real-life carnage has become something of a cinematic red line for me, admittedly complicating my otherwise open-minded philosophy regarding artistic depictions of aberrance.
My oft-frustrating sensitivity to cinematic depictions of mass gun violence came to mind as I watched The Drama (2026), Kristoffer Borgli’s new commercially successful (and critically divisive) dark romantic comedy. The film chronicles the repercussions of a woman’s revelation to her fiancé and friends that she had planned, but didn’t carry out, a school shooting when she was a teenager. The hesitant confession of the bride-to-be, Emma (Zendaya), occurs in mixed company—Emma’s maid of honor responds negatively to the admission because her cousin had been paralyzed in a shooting—days before her wedding to Charlie (Robert Pattinson). The final preparations for the nuptials become shrouded in unease and regret, with Charlie haunted by nightmarish images of mass death and the film’s soundtrack peppered with allusions to gunshots and screams of terror.
A crucial portion of The Drama follows a high-school-aged Emma, played by young actress Jordyn Curet, whom we see in a series of flashbacks being pushed into nihilism by her peers’ overt bullying. Obsessed with mass-shooter iconography and online gun-violence forums, Emma simmers with rage until an attack on her school, with specific people in mind to eliminate, feels like her only option. She even records a video manifesto to be discovered after her suicide, but it ultimately gets scuttled by a software update that crashes her computer.
In The Drama, Borgli, a Norwegian director, highlights American gun culture and mental illness and the ways they impact an impressionable child with a matter-of-fact sensibility. He doesn’t treat the teenage Emma as a vehicle for alarmist social commentary or moral instruction about “kids today,” but rather as a developing person whose future isn’t set in stone. Borgli emphasizes the ways that quasi-comical coincidences, like the unexpected computer failure, can push the Emmas of the world off a seemingly inexorable negative path. Case in point: She decides to call off the assault only after a mass shooting at a mall happens to take place on the day she was supposed to mount her own—its own comment on the unfathomable prevalence of such events.
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In the aftermath of that attack, which costs the life of a classmate of hers, Emma feels confused and overwhelmed by the outpouring of grief from the very people she had previously scorned. After a peer encourages her to join a new coalition against gun violence, she quickly makes friends in the club, and later becomes an outspoken activist. Fortuitous events and the compassion of her fellow students ultimately shock Emma into a position of empathy, all while she lives with a reminder of her capacity for destruction: her partial deafness, the product of incorrectly practice-firing her dad’s rifle in the woods.
I’ll admit that as I’ve aged, I’ve become even more sensitive to on-screen gun violence in general, regardless of whether it’s inflicted on adults or on children. Sometimes this discomfort can be productive, like with Alan Clarke’s landmark short film Elephant (1989), which coldly depicts 18 murders to highlight the social forces that gave rise to sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Other times, I am merely disgusted, like when I saw the other Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s film about a school shooting inspired by the Columbine massacre that uses minimalist formal techniques comparable to those in Clarke’s film but to dehumanizing and politically disorganized ends.
While I knew what the big reveal was in The Drama before I saw it, I was disarmed by Borgli’s palpably sensitive portrayal of (failed) mass-shooter psychology and his convincing depiction of intervention. “Violence—whether directed outward or inward‚ is rarely spontaneous. It is almost always preceded by signals that, in hindsight, feel painfully clear,” wrote Nicole Hockley, the mother of a child killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, arguing that Borgli accurately portrays troubling adolescent behavioral patterns that parents and educators routinely ignore.
The main preoccupation of The Drama is the psychological effects of the modern panopticon. Much of the film’s comedy involves Charlie’s splenetic paranoia about how others would perceive him and his relationship if they were to discover Emma’s “violent” past. Yet neither the film’s mild satire of American cultural sensitivities and liberal outrage nor its humorously eye-rolling attitude toward Charlie’s less-than-enlightened attitude undercuts its sincere depiction of a troubled child who is pulled from the brink of horror at the last second. In fact, the film’s anxious comedy renders its portrayal of Emma’s youth, and her forced reckoning as a conscience-stricken adult, all the more earnest in contrast.
Some critics have argued that Borgli opportunistically uses the widespread danger of school shootings to construct Emma’s characterization. (The film’s marketing campaign, which treats Emma’s secret as a “surprising” third-act twist for audiences to discover together, doesn’t help matters.) Theoretically, I should concur with this criticism, but Borgli’s mixture of sympathy and concern for Emma’s rage, ably brought to life by Curet, felt appropriately considered in my eyes. The Drama also doesn’t approach Emma’s disclosure lightly. To learn that a loved one was capable of such violence, even if she didn’t follow through with it, does indeed alter one’s perceptions. Borgli may use these ideas as a springboard for dark comedy, but he doesn’t present them with a smirking insincerity.
Borgli’s unsentimental view of American violence—its social foundation and the desensitized public discourse around it, especially—rang true to me as someone who, like many others, has witnessed the splintering of society. But as much as The Drama takes America’s alienated population and their reflexive love for destructive action as a given, it also exhibits a staunch belief in the capacity for human beings to change. Such muted optimism about people and reform can only arise from a hard-earned fatalism about our intractable culture. In a way, it’s the most my own worldview has been reflected on screen in some time.
Vikram MurthiVikram Murthi is a Brooklyn-based critic and a contributing writer to The Nation. He also edits Downtime Magazine, and his freelance work has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Reverse Shot, Criterion, Vulture, and sundry other publications.