Alana Haim’s Rachel Might Be the Secret Villain of The Drama

Well The Drama certainly got us talking. Even those who found Kristoffer Borgli’s dark relationship satire not to be entirely successful cannot seem to stop thinking about it, so maybe the writer-director is having the last laugh. As almost everyone knows by now (and if you don’t, you should probably not read any further), the film concerns an impending wedding that threatens to go off the rails after the bride, Emma (Zendaya), reveals that she almost committed a mass school shooting when she was 15 years old. This naturally shocks her fiancé, Charlie (Robert Pattinson), to the point that he becomes unsure whether he can go forward with the nuptials. While much of the initial discourse around the picture has centered on Emma’s intended act and the portrayal of her character, over the past couple of days another figure has begun to emerge as perhaps the movie’s secret villain: Alana Haim’s Rachel, Emma’s maid of honor and wife of Charlie’s best man, Michael (Mamoudou Athie).

Emma’s revelation comes during a drunken conversation one night when the four are relating the worst thing they ever did. What starts as a playful, casual parlor game suddenly turns incredibly dark, not just because of Emma’s confession but by Rachel’s sudden turn from loyal friend to judgmental scold. The 34-year-old Haim, a successful musician who with just four roles in five quick years has also established herself as one of our most fascinating actresses, plays this turn from cheerful bud to sanctimonious hater perfectly. Rachel does seem to have her reasons — her cousin, she explains, was paralyzed as a result of a shooting. But the film is also clearly having fun with Rachel’s smug self-righteousness: During a later scene, she insists that Michael, who is Black, “grew up around guns,” and a confused and somewhat offended Michael corrects her that he, in fact, did not grow up around guns; he just had an uncle who was a cop. 

Perhaps more pertinently, Rachel’s admission of the worst thing she ever did is itself quite monstrous: When she was younger, she went with a neighborhood kid (whom she describes as “slow”) out to an abandoned RV in the woods, locked him in a filthy closet, and ran away after he started screaming in terror. She adds also that she didn’t say anything later when the boy’s parents came by looking for him and the cops were called to search the area. Youthful indiscretion, perhaps, but there are some discomfiting echoes of this childhood sin in Rachel’s present attitude toward Emma: She is effectively abandoning a friend in need and not looking back. And the mild-mannered Michael’s confession that night is also indicative of the person he still is — the worst thing he ever did, he says, involved hiding behind his girlfriend when a dog attacked them in Mexico after she had kicked it. (They joke that he used her as “a human shield.”) If the RV incident reveals Rachel’s cruelty and self-protective callousness, the dog anecdote reveals Michael to be a milquetoast. Sure enough when he advises Charlie about dropping out of his marriage plans, it feels more like Rachel speaking through him.

At the same time, it is important that Emma never actually committed the deed. While Rachel and Michael seem to be enacting more mature variations on the same “worst thing” behavior they indulged in during their youth, Emma appears to have completely turned things around. We learn over the course of the film that after she abandoned her planned massacre (because, ironically, of a separate shooting that claimed the life of a classmate that very same day), Emma became a fierce advocate for gun control. Her military-man father even gives a speech about her activism at the wedding. Part of Charlie’s dilemma after Emma’s revelation is about whether she could perhaps attempt such a murderous act ever again. He interprets (misinterprets) several things she does in the least generous way possible: He freaks out when he sees her with a knife even though she was cutting something up in the kitchen, he seems concerned when he sees her screaming at a reckless driver even though it’s a thing pretty much any sane pedestrian who lives in a city has done, and he’s unnerved by her coolly firing their wedding DJ for doing heroin on the street even though she’s just following through on something they’ve already discussed (and he’s too chicken to do). There’s a genuine human mystery there — choosing to be with someone forever involves living with some amount of uncertainty. But there’s also an irony: Emma is the one person who completely turned her life around after her aborted misdeed. Ultimately she didn’t hurt anyone but herself, while it’s entirely possible Rachel’s old neighborhood pal still has nightmares about that time when he got locked in an RV for a whole day as a child. 

Borgli’s previous film, 2023’s Dream Scenario, featured Nicolas Cage as a mild-mannered academic who became famous after he mysteriously (and magically) wound up in total strangers’ dreams; that fame turned toxic, however, when his avatar in the dreams suddenly started assaulting people. Even though Cage’s character had nothing to do with these dream assaults in real life, this led to his suddenly becoming persona non grata everywhere he went because he was making others uncomfortable. After that provocative setup, Dream Scenario unfortunately devolved into a feeble, simplistic cancel-culture satire. (“It’s hard not to feel like a beautiful, provocative premise is being sacrificed on the altar of a few topical yuks,” I wrote in my mixed review at the time.)

In The Drama Borgli sublimates the satire even further, but he clearly evokes it through the figure of Rachel, whose stridency may at times remind us of some of the more vituperative characters we’ve come across on social media and, at various times, have been ourselves. Not just because of how quickly she turns on Emma but also because, on some level, she might be doing it subconsciously, to assuage her own sense of guilt over her previous misdeeds. In this, perhaps, she might have a secret ally in Charlie. Because let’s not forget the sin he confesses to on that boozy night: cyberbullying a kid so horribly that the boy’s family had to move. Charlie says this with Pattinson’s patented aw-shucks breeziness, so quickly and casually that it might not dawn on us at first what a horrific thing he’s admitting.

To be clear, Emma’s confession is truly disturbing. We can argue all day about whether Borgli, a Norwegian, is being too glib in building a thorny romantic satire around the kind of tragic act that has destroyed the lives of thousands of people in the U.S. But I don’t think the director is being oblivious: His home country suffered one of the worst mass shootings of the 21st century in 2011, when a neo-Nazi named Anders Breivik killed 77 people, many of them teenagers, and injured more than 300. (Paul Greengrass even made a movie about it.) Rather, Borgli is picking one of the worst things he can think of, because he wants to test our tolerance for thoughtcrime; Emma has to admit to planning something genuinely awful in order for this emotional mousetrap to work. We need to be outraged a little ourselves, because the film is questioning our reactions as well as the characters’. The real villain of the picture might not really be Rachel but those of us in the audience, sitting in silent judgment of the people onscreen. In the twisted moral universe of The Drama, and maybe in our own, the cruelest kids are the ones with the clearest consciences.