What Did I Miss About ‘The Drama’?[Opinion]

Kristoffer Borgli’s ‘The Drama’ is bogged down by drama, even if it’s easier to pretend it isn’t.

The Drama (2026), A24

Disclaimer: I have not seen (and have no plans to see) The Drama for reasons I will soon explain, but I have linked to the reviews where I found each plot detail I mention. This article — despite being more about the movie’s reception — will contain major spoilers.

Going into 2026 as a twentysomething who had been a fan of Zendaya since her Shake It Up days, The Drama was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. All of that changed, however, when news came out at the end of March that the writer/director, Kristoffer Borgli, had written an essay some years ago about dating a teenage girl when he himself was 27:

“If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen’s 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn’t my relationship — with a considerably smaller age difference — in 2012 be ‘within bounds’? I chose to listen to Woody over my friends.”

He detailed how mature he found her tastes; when he was young, he wrote, he drank and played games, while this mystery high-school girl was spending her youth attending gallery openings and getting her writing published.

“I think my cultural insight (and therefore, because I am who I am, my life insight) was delayed by ten years as a result of growing up in the countryside versus Oslo,” he wrote, as an explanation for chasing after the younger girl. You can read his essay in full in this article from *The Hollywood Reporter*.

Once I found out about this, I was surprised to find, after I skipped it a few weeks later, that the movie had performed so well at the box office (A24’s third biggest opening weekend, after Civil War and *Marty Supreme) and that it was the talk of the town in film spaces online. The story about Borgli’s essay had made it to some fairly big publications after being discovered on Reddit, including [People](https://people.com/zendaya-s-the-drama-director-under-fire-for-resurfaced-essay-about-dating-a-teenager-while-he-was-27-11936327), [Vulture](https://www.vulture.com/article/who-is-kristoffer-borgli-essay-teenager-the-drama.html), and [Entertainment Weekly](https://ew.com/the-drama-director-essay-defending-age-gap-romance-resurfaces-11936449)*, and it is the first thing to pop up when searching his name on Google.

Online controversy doesn’t seem to translate to low box office (if *Scream 7 and Sydney Sweeney-led [The Housemaid](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/paul-feig-the-housemaid-box-office-hit-1236484279/) showed us anything), but since Borgli’s The Drama* seemed to exist more in the bubble of people already into cinema with a vested interest in keeping up to date with news like this, a notable portion of its target audience should’ve had the resources to make an informed decision about whether they’d support it in theaters.

Given its success, it seems like many have made their decision.

The Drama (2026), A24

What makes this choice — a (financial) dismissal of wrongdoing — so fascinating is how it mirrors the audience’s response to the story of The Drama itself.

The film follows a soon-to-be-married couple, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson), as their lives spiral into disarray when a secret is revealed shortly before their wedding. In a game where the couple and two of their friends — Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie)— share the worst things they’ve ever done, Emma confesses that, as a lonely teenager, she had conspired to commit a school shooting.

While Emma didn’t go through with the actual killing, she planned it in detail and trained for months, going so far as to record a manifesto and form a list of which classmates she would kill. According to ScreenRant, she gave up on her plans after another mass shooting occurred in her town, and she “didn’t want to be overshadowed”, turning to anti-gun advocacy after the event because it helped her build community with her classmates.

Audiences have been quick to soften her wrongdoing or redirect blame entirely, calling other characters like Rachel (who is undoubtedly a “bad guy” in her own right) the “true villain” of the film or insulting other characters for their overblown reactions to Emma’s secret.

I don’t believe that school shootings (or anything, really) should be a forbidden topic for filmmakers (Megan Park’s The Fallout and Matt Johnson’s The Dirties, for instance, come to mind as handling the topic well), and it seems clear that Borgli’s choice to make this Emma’s secret was done with deliberate intention; school shootings are an open wound in the United States, and he would only be hurting himself to make them such a huge aspect of his film meaninglessly. One would think he brings them up to evoke a very specific feeling in a target audience who is forced to deal with the ramifications of this kind of violence every day.

To a director, poking a wound like this is useful because it is, to the American public, an unquestionable evil. Even if you believe the controversial TMZ article, in which a parent of a Columbine victim condemns the film, doesn’t necessarily have the most nuanced opinions, an article like it was inevitable, and that was the point. It is meant to sting because it is meant to be something the audience struggles to blindly forgive.

The design of this film, down to its blueprints, is — as it often is with Borgli, looking at Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself — to force the audience to reckon with cognitive dissonance: the simultaneous revulsion and sympathy they may feel for Emma, and, by proxy, how they feel about cancel culture. What does a “bad” person need to do to earn forgiveness or sympathy?

And yet, seemingly contrary to this thesis, the response to the film has so emphatically centered on the belief that Emma is not the “real” bad guy.

People have dismissed her actions as something she only thought about rather than did, which is true to an extent. Even though she did not actually carry out the act, this confession is without question a disturbing look into the type of violent hatred that the people around her didn’t know she was capable of, and yet it is watered down to that moment of her not going through with it.

The Drama (2026), A24

She would’ve gone through with it if it weren’t for poor timing, becomes she backed out at the last minute, a statement that grants her much more agency over the decision than the movie seemed to intend. External circumstances getting in her way become inner turmoil.

I don’t fault people for finding sympathy for the character, especially since it seems that’s the conclusion the film wants you to draw. Rachel, for instance, her maid of honor and biggest opposition throughout the film, is framed as annoying, hypocritical, and at least subtextually if not blatantly racist. Given that she is a performative ally to her cousin, an actual victim of a school shooting, it seems for the best to dismiss most everything she says. Even Charlie’s poor decisions during his panicked spiral may be used to show that he is less kind, less empathetic than Emma herself.

It is a sensible conclusion to feel for her, but it is fascinating how unintentionally conditional that sympathy seems to be; in order for it to be extended to her, her wrongdoing must be minimized.

Sugarcoating her actions may miss the point of the movie, sure, but more importantly, it reflects a bigger issue in how we associate our interests, preferences, and favorite characters with our morality. Instead of dealing with the uncomfortable feeling of having sympathy for someone who we know has done something terrible — like conspiring to kill someone — the audience lessens the terrible thing to something “not that bad” to avoid the discomfort entirely.

Instead of reckoning with the fact that they’re putting money in the pockets of a self-confessed predator, many audience members pretend the article Borgli wrote doesn’t exist, or frame the whole thing as a smear campaign against Zendaya (was it strange that her name was first and foremost? Yes, probably, but that doesn’t mean the whole situation wasn’t real).

This phenomenon is no doubt affected by the audience’s opinions about the players involved and the moralization of our preferences. That is to say that the people we already like should remain all-good, and those we don’t are all-bad; if they haven’t had a misstep yet, they will soon, and we can claim we knew it all along, as is often the case when celebrities are “cancelled” online.

The Drama (2026), A24

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are no doubt longtime celebrities with devoted fanbases from their time involved with Disney/Spider-Man and Twilight/Batman respectively, and that is likely in large part why they were cast in this film.

Barbarian director Zach Cregger put Bill Skarsgård (spoiler) as a red-herring villain in the beginning of the film, knowing you’d think of his run as Pennywise in IT and automatically distrust him; Emerald Fennell intentionally filled her rape-revenge drama Promising Young Woman with well-known male comedians such as Bo Burnham and Max Greenfield to play on a feeling of comfort in the audience; and Borgli is clearly after the same effect here with Zendaya and Pattinson’s familiar faces.

Familiarity with Zendaya only intensifies the shock when her secret is revealed, putting you in Charlie’s shoes as someone else with existing preconceptions about her kindness and integrity. It also, undoubtedly, makes it easier to sympathize with her, as is a goal of the film (Emma’s empathy is one of the main points of contention; Charlie deletes the sentence about it from his vows, but it’s her empathy that brings them back together at the end).

A Zendaya fan doesn’t want to leave the movie disliking her character, so they may end up minimizing Emma’s actions to get what they want. A Pattinson fan doesn’t want to skip his new movie, so they may end up minimizing the director’s actions to support their favorite actor.

In my opinion, it’s impossible to erase the context of Borgli’s predatory nature and “May-December romance” while engaging with this film. Both The Drama and Dream Scenario deal with the idea of cancel culture (which is, of course, relevant to someone like Borgli, who seemed to idolize Woody Allen pre-#MeToo); once someone has done the worst thing they can do, can we forgive them, he asks? Can you forgive me?

Can you forgive Borgli even if, like Paul in Dream Scenario, he believes he has done nothing wrong? Can you forgive him if, like Emma, he believes that he’s changed?

Can you watch the film without feeling strange that he used Zendaya as the face for his guilt and Pattinson as the face for his absolution? That a Norwegian director decided to use a heavy topic that is such a raw nerve for anyone growing up in the United States to stage his own personal exercise in the forgiveness of which he believes himself to be worthy?

When it comes to apologies, the phrase is to forgive and forget, but it seems that we’ve switched the order around: we forget, and once we’ve forgotten, there’s nothing left to forgive. While that may make things easier for us, I can’t say it’s better.