SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major plot spoilers for The Drama and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. You’ve been warned.
The marketing for the new movie The Drama depends on strategically concealing a secret about Zendaya’s character, despite the fact that this information is revealed within about 15 minutes of the film. Part of this is promotional savviness from A24; it creates an automatic intrigue around the character and story, with the backstop that the movie won’t be “ruined” to learn it ahead of time. (That is, it’s not a Sixth Sense-style twist ending.) It’s also part of the movie’s effectiveness to have the audience learn the secret alongside the movie’s other characters. Part of it, though, is purely practical, because the secret itself is alienating enough to put off the potential audience for a romance-adjacent movie starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. There’s no way to discuss this further without talking about this revelation, so consider yourself warned that this fact will be divulged in the following paragraph. Read no further if you have plans to see The Drama in the immediate future!
At a drunken pre-wedding food-tasting, Emma (Zendaya), Charlie (Robert Pattinson), and their best-friend couple (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie) go around and each say the “worst thing” they’ve ever done. Everyone has something pretty bad, but more or less within the realm of normal human experiences. Emma’s, however, stops the room cold. She confesses that, as a teenager, she planned a school shooting. She never went through with it, but it wasn’t just an idle thought, either: She had her dad’s rifle and a plan of attack and an explanation she intended to leave behind on video. A confluence of fates set her on another path, and she never told anyone about her horrific ideation.
Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli doesn’t exactly play this information for laughs, at least not at first. He takes Emma seriously as a character, and short flashbacks to her teenage years key into the pain and alienation that brought her to this unwell mental headspace. He also seems to understand why Charlie is unmoored by this revelation, though he’s seemingly less sympathetic to the over-the-top fury exhibited by Rachel (Haim), who takes the information weirdly personally. (She suggests calling the police, as if hoping to report a decade-old thought crime.) At the same time, there’s some Larry David-ish social niceties and related quirks Borgli is happy to exploit from this third rail. They’re both philosophically interesting (is Emma’s unexecuted plan “worse” than the bad things that the other characters actually went through with?) and blackly hilarious. The latter quality arrives as we gradually learn the various reasons Emma doesn’t go through with her murderous plan: One is that she’s swept up into the outcry about another mass shooting in a nearby mall; in a more quotidian moment, her computer repeatedly crashes when she tries to record her video confession.
Surprisingly, The Drama isn’t the only 2026 movie to address the topic of school shootings from a darkly funny angle; it isn’t even the one that goes the further in this regard. That would be Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a sci-fi action comedy from Gore Verbinski that features vignettes explaining various backstories of characters that come together to fight off an encroaching A.I. villain. The darkest of these stories involves Susan (Juno Temple), a mother whose teenage son was killed in a mass shooting; we see her go through what seems like a relatively routine procedure to have the boy cloned and brought back to her. The company that makes money with this service plays like a naturally ghoulish extension of those that schools pay for extensive drills or other safety measures; anything, in other words, but actually addressing gun control. These scenes in Good Luck are genuinely shocking – not least for the cathartic satirical daring in turning this epidemic into a devastatingly pointed joke.
A smaller recent release, Our Hero, Balthazar, also hits black-comic notes around this subject, though it’s more traditionally harrowing and closer to ground level. In it, a privileged teenager (Jaeden Martell) attempts to virtue-signal his way into the heart of his socially conscious crush, failing to fully understand the how or the why of opposing gun violence – which brings him to track down a potential school shooter (an unrecognizable Asa Butterfield) and attempt to befriend him. They become unlikely comrades in edgelord arms (literally, at least in the “arms” aspect), at least for a time. Like The Drama, this movie deals more with someone who has thought about committing mass murder than the fallout from an actual incident – and for that matter, Good Luck keeps the incident well off-screen, too.
Even without exactly depicting mass shootings, these movies addressing the topic at all (especially outside of a strictly serious issue-narrative context) reps a shift. In 2003, Gus Van Sant’s haunting Elephant never played on more than 40 screens in North America, grossing just over a million dollars in its domestic run. (It made a little more overseas, and frankly $10 million worldwide for an experimental, improvised school-shooting drama seems almost miraculous now.) Granted, that movie was directly inspired by the 1999 Columbine shooting, then still relatively recent, and depicts a similar event with upsetting detail; it’s not anything like mainstream entertainment. But even a more traditional post-shooting drama like 2022’s The Fallout was an HBO Max premiere, not a wide release. (HBO has a history of willingness to tackle this subject, having also produced Elephant as well as the recent doc Thoughts & Prayers, exploring the school-safety industry that Good Luck tacitly mocks.)
The Drama and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die bring the subject to thousands of multiplex screens and have the audacity to hope audiences might actually laugh somewhere in the vicinity. Yet neither movie (nor Balthazar, a smaller release) strikes me as smirking edgelord material, daring audiences to bolt. The simple, cynical (or is it just realistic?) view would be that mass shootings have become too commonplace to ignore. But there may be more to it: Treating the problem with sober-minded sensitivity sometimes scans as too wan for the growing anger and frustration so many parents (and students, for that matter) feel about this epidemic. I know that as a parent, I laughed loudly at the sickest jokes of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, not out of nihilism but a strange relief that a mainstream film would acknowledge how absurd and grotesque the mass-shooting situation has become.
The Drama isn’t quite so irreverent, or even taking aim at gun culture in the same way, but it is confrontational just by acknowledging, as one of the characters does, that if there are this many mass shootings in the U.S., there must be countless more people who think about the act but don’t go through with it. Our Hero, Balthazar has a similar observation about the invisible time bombs ticking all around us. At some point, a movie will probably address this topic in a similar tone that will come across as glib or shallow (and certainly some may see any of these movies as those things). For now, though, breaking the taboo of acknowledgment feels important. The status quo likes thoughts and prayers because they’re both forms of polite silence.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
