Welcome back to Second Thought. Thanks to River Page for filling in last week—and letting us in on his Mr. and Mrs. Noem fan fiction. There are major spoilers for The Drama below, so proceed with caution.
To Have and to Scold
Imagine this: You’re the young, handsome head curator at the Cambridge Art Museum, deciding between which skin-contact wine you’d like to serve at your rapidly approaching wedding to a gorgeous, funny woman whom you adore. And then you find out during a lighthearted game with friends that 15 years prior, when she was 15—not to mention unchaperoned, bullied, and too online—she’d planned to take her father’s rifle and do a school shooting.
There’s the premise of The Drama, which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as the engaged couple, and which is framed as a dark psychological drama, a rom-com, and a black comedy all at once. The film is more concerned with a thought experiment than virtuosic filmmaking in any genre, and the experiment, done very well, is this: What would you do if you found out something deeply unsettling about someone that you thought you knew? And what if that something was that they were geared up to commit mass violence on innocent children? And you’re geared up to marry them.
