The A24 drama dropped at the beginning of this month, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I watched.
After months of top-tier marketing, this was easily one of the most anticipated films to come out. And honestly, a big part of that was the casting. You had Zendaya and Robert Pattinson—our Disney/Euphoria star and our Twilight heartthrob. A duo we weren’t expecting but were surprisingly good together.
Between the press run interviews, their chemistry, and even the conversations about relationships and wedding advice, everything about the rollout made it feel light, fun, and honestly kind of romantic. So never in a million years did I think it would take the turn that it did.
Spoiler alert.
We knew Zendaya’s character, Emma, had a deep, dark secret. The trailers made that clear. But were we expecting her to say that when she was younger, she was planning to shoot up her school because she was bullied?
Absolutely not.
The moment she said it, I was triggered—and I don’t say that lightly.
I’m from Michigan, and between 2021 and 2023, there were two school shootings in my state that hit way too close to home. The first was the Oxford High School shooting during my senior year of high school, less than an hour away from me. The second was the Michigan State University shooting my freshman year of college, at a school where nearly half of my graduating class attends.
So this storyline didn’t just shock me—it felt personal.
We come from a generation that has been doing lockdown drills since elementary school. That’s not fiction for us. That’s real life. So for a film to introduce a plot like this, and then frame it around bullying with little to no in-depth context or feeling toward the bullying that provoked Emma’s indignation—and without any real warning or sensitivity—felt completely off.
And I get not wanting to spoil the movie, but this issue is bigger than a plot twist.
Many of us have experienced shootings in school, lost someone to a school shooting, etc. That’s trauma on top of trauma. So I have to ask: when did it become okay to humanize a potential school shooter like this, even in a “backstory,” especially in a generation that is already heavily influenced by media?
And then there’s the casting choice.
Why choose for Zendaya’s character to be the almost school shooter when you have Robert Pattinson—a whole white man—as her co-star? That’s what really threw me. Not even on a performance level, but just in terms of realism and representation. Let’s be honest—when have we ever seen a Black woman in the news for something like that? It felt like the film was reaching for shock value instead of something grounded in reality.
That choice matters.
What also didn’t sit right with me was how disconnected the press run felt from the actual weight of the film. You have Zendaya surprising a couple by attending their wedding at the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas—even signing their marriage license as an official witness—all as a promotional stunt for The Drama. And it’s just like… we could’ve used moments like that to bring awareness to school shootings.
It reminded me of how It Ends with Us was handled, when Blake Lively was promoting her hair care line during the rollout—and even at the premiere of a film centered around domestic violence.
At some point, it becomes a matter of reading the room.
For a movie that had this much anticipation and this level of marketing, I just expected more care behind such a heavy storyline. If you’re going to take on something like this, it deserves intention, awareness, and responsibility—not just shock value.
Because at the end of the day, this isn’t just entertainment.
For some of us, it’s lived experience.