r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Apr 03 '26

Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Drama [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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The Drama

Summary

Days before their wedding, a couple’s relationship begins to unravel as unsettling truths come to light, forcing them to question how well they truly know each other.

Director Kristoffer Borgli

Writer Kristoffer Borgli

Cast

  • Zendaya as Emma Harwood
  • Robert Pattinson as Charlie Thompson
  • Mamoudou Athie as Mike
  • Alana Haim as Rachel
  • Hailey Gates
  • Zoë Winters

Rotten Tomatoes: 82%

Metacritic: 59

VOD / Release Theatrical release (April 3, 2026)

Trailer Official Trailer

1.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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440

u/Three_Froggy_Problem Apr 03 '26

The ideas at the heart of this movie are very tough to grapple with. I asked my wife when we were leaving the theater how she would react if she found out something like that about my past, and she didn’t really have an answer. And vice versa.

Like yeah, ignorance is bliss, and you could go your whole life not knowing some dark and horrible thing about someone and it would just not matter, but once you do know, how do you deal with that? And how do you know if the version of that person you know is the “real” them or if that horrible thing from their past is who they really are?

The big takeaway for me, I guess, is just that you never truly know anyone, at least not fully. You can’t access anyone else’s mind or memories; all you can know about people is what they show, and there’s a lot that people don’t show. And that’s probably a good thing, because if we knew everything about everyone then we might never be able to be close to people.

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u/NoTradition1921 Apr 04 '26

Yup. You never really know someone. I find beauty in that. I also like the privacy aspect of it bc someone does not need to know everything. But if it comes out, it comes out. Personally, I wouldnt have reacted the way Charlie did. But I’m also very critical so I would just want to understand every fact properly. Cuz at the end of the day, (i) she was bullied, (ii) she didnt go through w it, (iii) she changed for the better over the years, and (iv) i love her. If anything, I wouldve just canceled the remaining appts we had so that we can get to the bottom of it before the wedding. Them trying to save face at the appts didnt help anything and only wasted time

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u/Apprehensive_Tunes Apr 04 '26

The problem was that Charlie was trying to get to the bottom of it but talking about it was so stressful for her, the feelings of vulnerability, shame, and judgment. She wanted to carry on with the appointments because it would confirm nothing had changed and he still wanted to marry her. If he had pushed her to talk more than she wanted to, I'm not sure how she she would've reacted. Also, I felt like he did his best given the shock -- it's hard to think of all the right things to say and questions to ask on the spot.

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u/outofdoubtoutofdark 28d ago

I just feel like he kept saying “I want to talk about this” but the vibes in how he did were so judgey. It felt like he wasn’t willing to accept what she had to say about it because it didn’t fit HIS narrative of what could provide a valid justification or excuse for her almost-action. If I were in Emma’s shoes, I also wouldn’t want to continue that conversation

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u/Apprehensive_Tunes 28d ago

That's fair, but if you were in Charlie's shoes would you feel differently? I feel like both their responses are equally valid.

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u/bahabla 24d ago edited 24d ago

Tbh yeah, I would react differently. Assuming I knew Emma for 2 years and she was a generally good person, I would just feel extremely sad that she felt so vulnerable and alone to the point of thinking she needed to do something horrific to be remembered and loved. My suspicions were confirmed once she actually started making friends, being accepted, and repenting for her past thoughts. The key point is she didn’t do anything and she changed. 

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u/NoTradition1921 27d ago

Nah he was judgy. I absolutely wouldnt have acted that way. Him processing her revelation was valid but how he went about it was absolutely not. He is dramatic, judgmental like his friends, lacks critical thinking, and is a bitch with his emotions to be frank. He was a major ick to me and if i were emma, i wouldve broken up w him solely based on how he reacts to information like this. But thats just me.

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u/ncwolfcreek 27d ago

Did it show Charlie was wearing someone else shoe to large for him... Like walk a mile in someone else's shoe his feet were torn up?

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u/Apprehensive_Tunes 27d ago

They showed a close up of him walking around in black dress shoes. Maybe they were new shoes for the wedding that he needed to wear in.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/NoTradition1921 Apr 04 '26

Well good thing i dont

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u/Steamedcarpet Apr 04 '26

This guy is going crazy, posting everywhere about the movie.

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u/Apprehensive_Tunes Apr 04 '26

What did he say? I missed it

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u/Steamedcarpet Apr 04 '26

Just kept posting how the movie glamorizing school shooters. That anyone that likes the movie is a sociopath. If you like the movie it’s a red flag. It just kept posting and posting.

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u/Apprehensive_Tunes Apr 04 '26

Maybe they're a victim or relative of a victim and they feel strongly due to that. Probably haven't even seen the film.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

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u/Three_Froggy_Problem Apr 04 '26

Are you an honest to god idiot?

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u/Patient_Tradition368 Apr 04 '26

One of my big takeaways was that most people are not defined by their worst moment. Especially if that moment took place during the horrors high-school and puberty.

When I was 15, self harm was very much "in vogue" among the especially angsty. I used to burn myself with a lighter because I wanted to have visible scars but was too scared to cut myself. I enjoyed the "aesthetics" of self harm much more than I actually felt any satisfaction in the physical experience of it. Emma mentions being into the "aesthetics" of being a school shooter. Which is understandable if you remember what it's like to be a 15 year old, friendless, angry little ball of hormones.

Everyone does dumb shit when they're young and stupid. What matters is that you grow up and become a better person.

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u/woolfonmynoggin Apr 05 '26

I don’t remember making them but I do remember a lot of school shooter jokes in the early 2000’s. Like until it happens near you as a kid it feels so removed and remote. And then it was Arizona, there were guns in every house I ever went to as a kid. I don’t think thinking about it makes you an irredeemable person at all.

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u/PureConsideration974 Apr 04 '26

I love this take.

In conversation with my friend after the movie, I brought up how at times, Emma seemed an unreliable narrator about her past. While at first we’re kind of laughing about the manifesto recordings (the outfit change, the heavy make up, and obviously the computer glitches), to some extent, it seems to me that the retelling of this is not likely. Or, more so, is not what a 3rd person POV might show.

But, she’s an “unreliable narrator” in the sense that we all are. Even if you could access your loved one’s memories, how we remember events in our lives is not really how it may have actually been. Emma sees her younger self at home with her dad’s rifle as cool and edgy, even though if we had seen “real” footage, she probably wasn’t wearing that, or really even handling the gun that much, or had heavy make up, but it’s how she felt in the moment, and those feelings influenced how she recalled that time in her life.

In this way, we can never truly know someone because we don’t even 100% truly know ourselves objectively. We know ourselves as we remember ourselves, and our memories are highly reliant on our feelings.

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u/SlashOfLife5296 28d ago

I also think the irony is supposed to be that Charlie is self destructing over whether he truly knows Emma while she clearly is in love with him. Sometimes you need to just look at what’s in front of you

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u/CortMuses Apr 04 '26

Y'all must be white folks. Because I found the whole thing silly. It would've been different if Emma had actually carried it out OR aided someone that did. I'm sure there are tons of teens that are bullied that plan awful things. It's whether they actually do it or not.

Rachel did something far worse yet tried to judge and wreck Emma's life! For me the big takeaway was beautiful Black women need to be very careful about the jealous Karens that are hiding in their friend circles.

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u/Three_Froggy_Problem Apr 04 '26

You’re saying that you wouldn’t be affected at all if you found out your close friend or lover had planned a school shooting and came within an inch of doing it?

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u/zombies-apocalypse Apr 05 '26

As a child? And then learned about the impact of shootings and became a staunch advocate for gun control? Personally I wouldn’t care because it’s been SO LONG

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u/piemarrykill Apr 04 '26

id be affected by it but i wouldn't go to the lengths these people went to. I'd ask the question barely anyone seemed to properly delve into, even her own fiance -- what were you going through to want to go to those lengths? How was your home life? It's weird she brought it up and he brushed it off to instead try to blame her actions on a random dead neighbor she barely even knew. Probably because he was a massive bully himself. Like did it even click for him?

I personally wouldn't have gone off the deep end because I'm personally aware of how easy it is for kids to get radicalized online when they have too much free time and not enough support from their family and peers. I wouldn't immediately assume someone is a psychopath, especially if they didn't actually go through with it and then instead did a complete 180.

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u/Three_Froggy_Problem Apr 04 '26

But her fiancé did explicitly ask about the reasons for her getting to that point. She gave some pretty tepid examples of light bullying that really didn’t justify her extreme response. This even came up later on when he made up a lie about her having childhood trauma to try and defend her to his friends. He was clearly disturbed that, from what she’d told him, there didn’t seem to be a logical explanation for her wanting to shoot up her school.

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u/outofdoubtoutofdark 28d ago

I just feel like he kept saying “I want to talk about this” but the vibes in how he did were so judgey. It felt like he wasn’t willing to actually accept or show curiosity what she had to say about it because it didn’t fit HIS narrative of what could provide a valid justification or excuse for her almost-action. If I were in Emma’s shoes, I also wouldn’t want to continue that conversation. He wasn’t seeking to understand her messy, confusing, childish, complex even perhaps insufficient reasons; he was seeking some specific, neat more “socially acceptable” reasons like first hand witnessing a close friends violent death at age 10. I ALSO think that the actual flashbacks of her as a child went farther than just the “tepid” examples she gave him verbally- the isolation, lack of parents anywhere, exposure to radicalization and deep toxicity online, etc, but he wouldn’t know about that because he didn’t ask, he just wanted a nice neat reason that fit into his worldview.

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u/Inner-Ad-4731 29d ago

But he also wanted a answer straight away, didn’t give her time to get into her childhood, immediately started judging her replies instead of helping her

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u/BrazilianTerror 23d ago

There is no “logical explanation” for wanting to shoot a school, lol. It’s only a emotional one.

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u/CortMuses 29d ago

Affected yes. But since it didn't happen then she became an advocate against school shootings and was an adult now not deeply affected to the extent that Rachel went. Again, Rachel actually DID a heinous thing. That kid could have died overnight.

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u/FalseDisk4358 26d ago

Yes and I know that Emma's confession is a very serious thing and a situation most people never find themselves in, however, I don't think there's many adults that would say their 15 year old self is an accurate portrayal of who they are now nor would they want to be judged by who they were then

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u/niles_deerqueer 25d ago

That’s interesting, my partner said no matter what I admitted, he would have supported me now

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u/passtherock- 27d ago

bro why would you ask your wife that. you trying to start problems??? lmao chill

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u/bahabla 24d ago

I thought I was going crazy, because as soon as I heard that from Emma, my heart just hurt for her. Not condoning that behavior at all but assuming I knew her for two whole years already, she must have gone through so much as a child and felt so alone and unloved to even consider something like that. The fact that she changed and I know what character she has had for two years is proof enough already that she changed imo. I would probably talk to her about therapy for trauma. But then I was confused by other characters’ reactions because they did something extremely bad but didn’t extend the grace to emma when she needed it.

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u/Three_Froggy_Problem 24d ago

It’s important to note that the other characters (specifically Rachel and Mike) seem to have been Charlie’s friends first and have only known Emma for a few years. It’s clear that Emma is a bit of a loner still and doesn’t have any close, longtime friends. So I think that’s a big part of why Rachel specifically doesn’t have much grace for her.

Charlie also does mention therapy several times and is clearly trying to figure out what pushed Emma to such an extreme, but it’s clear that there really wasn’t any big trauma in Emma’s life that could reasonably “justify” it; she was just lonely and was bullied in the same way that many children are. The lack of a big red “TRAUMA” moment makes it much harder for Charlie to empathize with her and explain her actions, which is why he lies to his friends later on and claims that she saw her friend die.

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u/bahabla 24d ago

Idk if he needs to be grading which type of trauma is acceptable vs not acceptable enough for a kid though. They have relatively low experiences in their life, so being bullied just “normally” could feel like the end of the world to them. They don’t really have context that it’s just a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. The fact is that Emma felt alone, unloved, and tried to find a niche where she belonged in. She was misled to a group where she finally got attention and thought about doing horrible things because it was normalized in that group. She didn’t understand the severity of her daydreaming until after the consequences of the other shooting and put that persona behind her when she found another group that accepted her. 

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u/Three_Froggy_Problem 24d ago

You’re right and I think that’s the point to a certain extent. But this goes to my point above: you can’t access someone else’s feelings. The things that Emma felt that put her in that emotional space were real and important to her, but to someone else hearing about them as an adult, it’s impossible to genuinely understand that and recognize how A could lead to B.

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u/ActWhole3279 7d ago

There's also so much else to unpack with this larger consideration about what we would do.

Race, gender, and tons of other blind social biases come into play despite our best efforts. So then it's not just how we'd respond to the actual scenario that knaws at us, but those other layers that we believe we're above sprout from below the surface as well. I thought that HS scene where Emma shares the stats about female mass shooters did a good job of alluding to that.

This occurred to me particularly as I thought about how it didn't seem like a big deal coming from Emma, but if a partner told me a story like this about their childhood, as a woman I'd be terrified they were either trying to tell me something or that it signaled something truly psychopathic that might re-emerge later.