The central conceit of Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama” is a simple one that spirals outward into a Möbius strip of destruction, self-evisceration, and awkward revelation all spun from a simple question: What is the worst thing that you have ever done? Think about it. We all have something. It’s a question worth pondering, though perhaps left smothered deep beneath our pillowy subconscious, shuttered away from the judging, yet often complicit, opinions of above ground society. This instinct is certainly self-preserving, but a necessity when we, flawed humans, are meant to walk amongst the living with our best intentions and sunny salutations. The depths of our souls are a fraught miasma of intrusive thought, fantasy, destruction, and pain where the best and worst of ourselves rage for domination. None escapes this; it is our damnation for being born in a fraught and complicated world without ethereal guidance beyond our own understanding and failure as our only North Star. You’d imagine we might be more forgiving as a people, each of us chronically ill-formed in spirit and mind. It is certainly easier to ignore the shameful moments skulking in our past, to believe them fleeting and forgettable in the grand canvas of someone’s life, than it is to risk judgement, or worse rejection, from someone you love; a person who looks at you with doting affection and pride, who might one day trip and tumble down the long, descending staircase that leads toward our own personal pits of despair, where the long-fingered creatures that lurk and creep the chasms of our most despicable moments find refuge and sanctuary. “The Drama” presents such a descent, a pinwheeling mine field of best intentions and worst case scenarios that plague a woman who dares to unveil the most sensitive, fleshy bits of her heart, only to have those closest to her gnash it to confetti like so much wedding day rice and a man desperate to paste Humpty Dumpty together again. If only they knew the ramifications of throwing gravel in glass houses, they might themselves have avoided the natural bloodying that occurs when flailing among so much free-flying emotional shrapnel.
“The Drama” follows Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), a happy, successful couple, merely days away from their wedding. At a dinner with their Best Man and Maid of Honor, a conversation opens up regarding the worst thing each of them has done. Best Man Mike (Mamoudou Athie) once pushed his girlfriend in front of an attacking dog, while Maid of Honor Rachel (Alana Haim) once locked a mentally challenged neighbor into an abandoned RV in the woods, a troubling revelation that the group laughs past without much further dissection. Charlie merely claims to have cyberbullied a fellow student until his family moved away, though that might ultimately be a coincidence. Finally, the turn falls to Emma, who admits, drunkenly but not without some hope that this might be played off as a quirky fact from a troubled youth, that she once planned and nearly executed a school shooting in Baton Rouge, LA. When they realize that she is not joking, that the mild-mannered and kind Emma is truthfully admitting her most secret shame, all hell breaks loose. Rachel is furious, as her cousin was shot and paralyzed in a school shooting, while Mike tries to play mediator. It’s Charlie who is most unmoored by this revelation, unsure how to reconcile the woman he knows with the girl she admits to once being. With the wedding fast approaching, now is not the best time to be reassessing the totality of the person you hope to spend the rest of your life with. Emma, for her part, realizes immediately that she has messed up; her mind ping-ponging between best-case scenarios, Charlie laughing it off, and the worst, Charlie calling the police. It is as if the thin veil of calm has been ripped away from their collective psyche and opened a gash in normality where raging paranoia brews beneath the soft smiles of wedding photos, and some eruption is assured to take place amid the pre-nuptial niceties.
While the front half of the film focuses on Emma’s experience of existing in a world where the balloon of innocence has been popped, it is Charlie’s crumbling reality that is the film’s main target. As a seemingly mild-mannered academic, Charlie is not equipped to address a turd floating in the punch bowl of his upcoming life partnership; caught between the fury of his friends and the unease he feels to have been sleeping with, and falling in love with, someone whose face could have, in another reality, been plastered across a Netflix true crime documentary series. Trying to rationalize things is useless because there are no good answers to “why” Emma felt the need to take a rifle to school. She wasn’t overtly traumatized as a child; she was bullied but not to an exorbitant degree, and even the reason she failed to go through with her plan isn’t that she had a change of heart but that ANOTHER shooting had already happened across town, killing one of her classmates. As clearly the last straw for a man whose carefully constructed world view was perhaps teetering more than he might prefer, sensing that his future wife might have psychotic manifestations lurking behind her loving eyes is enough to send Charlie into a smoldering panic. What the movie does not overtly state, to its benefit, is the implication of what Charlie is actually so frantic about. There is the obvious idea that my wife might be a killer in disguise, a silly idea that seems to take root and spread like kudzu. But, as the film progresses and concludes, there is something to be said for the alternative; that he might, in fact, still love her, accept her, and embrace her even with the demons playing timpani drums in her rearview. Such irrationality is dangerous and potentially ruinous for someone whose life seemed to be on the comforting rails of success and cordiality. Loving a person who once was moments away from becoming a murdering monster, in some ways, might make Charlie just as much of a pariah as she is; it would alienate his closest friends, and perhaps even his own family. That realization, that yawning, terrifying, trapped sensation of retaining lockstep with someone scorned by people who would otherwise love you is no small feat; it’s the kind of thing that creates rivets in lifetimes and fissures that are easy to get lost within. That Charlie slips and tumbles down into the chasm is predictable and pathetic, if not also sympathetic in its own scrambling way, and it is a testament to the film’s lack of need to put a fine point on its reason for existing that the movie leaves itself open-ended but satisfying enough for some hope to bloom. The questions it poses are its purpose, and that’s enough for me.
“The Drama” is not so much a movie about a would-be school shooter as it is about the terror we all feel at being exposed for the dirt-squirming worms that we are in our worst moments. It doesn’t take a psychopath to want to put their best foot forward; the face we present is merely a mask, after all, for the chaos that rages just behind the softest of smiles. As Charlie argues to his judgmental friends, how many people walking the streets have planned something horrific and not gone through with it? There’s plenty of horror that occurs every day, perpetuated by seemingly normal people; it would be ignorant to assume that there are not legions more for whom the thought, the plan, the fantasy is not a warm balm that overwhelms and then shames them. As her world was suddenly becoming unmoored, I couldn’t help but feel intense empathy for Emma, a girl who became consumed by online power fantasies and almost took things way too far. But for a tweak of fate, she might have made the worst mistake of her life and been left with the fallout of bloody imaginings made all too real. That she didn’t is perhaps not a virtue, but it is certainly a blessing, a bullet that just missed its mark as hers ultimately would not have. “The Drama” offers a perspective that, while we are not the worst of ourselves, those thoughts, actions, and beliefs are still a part of us, stamped into the bedrock of an existence built atop a spoiled Earth. That any of us make it through this life unscathed is a miracle; that most of us dodge our own self-destruction is perhaps even more miraculous still.
There but for the grace of God go we all.
You’ll be glad you did.
“The Drama” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
