(This review contains spoilers. Do not read it if you have not seen the movie.)

Norwegian director Kristoff Borgli’s previous two feature films have satirized the alienating effect of exposure in the antisocial age of social media. In “Sick of Myself,” Signe’s jealous lust for attention drives her to intentionally disfigure herself, desperate for sympathy to be a path to popularity. In “Dream Scenario,” also-ran professor Paul Matthews experiences an unexpected and meteoric rise to global icon status - and then endures the precipitous and inevitable drop awaiting anyone who approaches the apex of modernity’s zeitgeist.

“The Drama” chambers a central conceit of the former (the toxifying effect of an identity crisis on a relationship) and the latter (pinning life-deflating consequences on someone based on conceptual actions) and applies the pressure of a uniquely American taboo to the trigger, discharging Borgli’s best work yet.

Still fascinated by society’s unceasing search for the moral high ground, Borgli conjures another distinctly bleak and dark romcom around a series of questions that pair terribly with a bottle of skin-contact wine: How accountable is someone for their worst thoughts? What form of adjudication is most appropriate for a plan, however heinous, unfulfilled? To what degree is a functional adult beholden to their most disturbing notions as a juvenile?

Key to making this feel like a predatory interrogation is Zendaya’s career-best performance as Emma. She employs her natural charm to portray a character who is both disarming and disarmed, at first free from her past and then persecuted for it. Emma is immediately the apple of Charlie’s (Robert Pattinson) eye, even if his initial approach falls upon a deaf ear. The film fast forwards past the premarital courtship elegantly through a series of flashbacks inspired by Charlie’s work-in-progress wedding speech. But the strength of their connection is quickly undermined by what they don’t know about each other, or at least the one thing Charlie does not know about who his bride-to-be used to be. A week away from the wedding, a tipsy Emma reveals to her fiancé, as well as the best man and maid of honor, that she once planned a school shooting.

Borgli constructs the framework for his latest social satire about humanity’s eroding compatibility with a sensibility and lack of sensitivity that matches with his previous works. Once Emma spills the tea, the gaps are filled in with tragicomic glimpses of her teenage self gripping a rifle like a comfort stuffed animal during her many failed attempts to film a morbid manifesto (shout-out Sally!). The worst things his characters have done are the driving force of the narrative, but they are not specific to his overall point. Emma’s secret could have been derived from any number of sensitive subjects, such as a failed suicide attempt or shooting a dog (something one of the flashbacks shows us she considered), without nullifying the film’s themes. If the script was flipped and Charlie said his biggest blemish was getting a DUI, perhaps he would have been the one to incite Rachel’s ire, for her cousin could have been paralyzed by a collision with a drunk driver instead of a shooting. (Rachel is a truly reprehensible character, portrayed villainously and expertly by Alana Haim.)

What a potential school shooting offers as a plot device is a guaranteed touchstone at scale. Virtually everyone watching this movie has been enrolled at a school; audience members under 30 probably even went through active shooter training drills. Everyone watching this movie has seen coverage of mass shootings on the news, over and over and over again. And everyone watching this movie in the theater is taking some degree of risk to do so, likely even more than with your average film given the subject matter, because of what happened in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012. Mass shootings are universally understood and discomforting in the United States, in even more ways than suicide and drunk driving. When the backup DJ drops some of his gear, there’s a fraction of a second, intrinsic for multiple generations of Americans now, when you instinctually assume what you just heard was not part of the movie. (I know my eyes jumped to the entrance by the bottom of the stairs.)

Borgli’s films are all about the corrosive side effects of attention. Here he posits that a lack of regard can be just as destructive to the psyche.

Most of the criticism of "The Drama" condemns Borgli for evoking this politically charged subject matter without cross-examining it thoroughly. It’s true that the movie does not attempt to say anything profound about America’s gun violence problems, but in expecting him to do so, Borgli is being punished for making the first mainstream film to prominently feature such imagery, particularly from the perspective of a potential assailant. Had this thorny topic been broached on the big screen before, perhaps it would be easier for some to engage with an offering that uses the recoil of mass shootings to examine and humorize moral hypocrisies within a small group of friends rather than attempting to reverse America’s grander societal rot.

In this original script, Borgli had the entire palette of traumatic and problematic character flaws at his disposal, and he chose to color between the outlines of his caricatures with a bright, bloody red. He enters uncharted waters and propagates a sin that’s impossible to be insouciant about, but forgoes a call for America to repent and turn over their guns. While Borgli has been chastised for undercooking his rebuke of America's militarized "Brainrot", to the extent that it was even the main course to begin with, the trade-off is potent word-of-mouth promo about a shocking revelation.

If that seems exploitative, maybe it is. But in a sense, Borgli is betting on the audience to prove his point: That the United States is enthralled enough with mass shootings to find a subversive intrigue in Emma's disclosure. Americans are willing to consume content about mass shootings (e.g. this movie) but are averse to engaging in the conversations necessary to stop them from happening. That's because it involves two policy matters – gun control and health care – that their government has no interest in addressing. The country is fixated on gun violence, and thus apathetic toward its extinction.

Furthermore, Americans are just as uncomfortable with the idea of rehabilitation as they are with any perceived infringement on their 2nd Amendment rights. Prisons are overflowing as profits spill into deep pockets and disenfranchised families drown in waves economic and spiritual hardship. Emma is not prosecuted for her theoretical crimes, but the fear of ostracization over her thoughts forces her to bury those feelings in a place where they are unlikely to be exhumed and properly examined.

Ironically, the character with skeletons in her closet is the only person who seems comfortable in their own skin – at least until those closest to Emma overwhelm her defense mechanisms so they can chastise her teenage subconscious. Charlie experiences a bifurcation of his love in a way that maps perfectly onto the United States’ relationship with guns; the line between horror and fetishization is very thin. He struggles to determine whether this is the scariest thing about Emma, or the sexiest.

For someone who came dangerously close to upending the lives of hundreds of kids, Emma is reformed and well-adjusted. Her turn to gun control activism is quirky, but representative of a high schooler’s fickle state of mind. All it took was a few new friends to recontextualize dozens of perceived enemies. All things considered, her life turned out great. The average public school student in the United States is probably more likely to encounter a mass shooting than to wind up in the cozy apartment and commodious office spaces on display within this affluent, artsy, Boston-based coterie.

But has Emma found her perfect match? Borgli is always keen to explore the hollow nature of contemporary relationships. Has a genuine romance sprouted from Charlie’s sneakily engineered meet cute, or is modern love nothing more than mining for overlapping interests in an attempt to cure our loneliness? Do we know the people we love, or just the parts of them that reinforce our prerogatives?

Nothing puts a relationship to the test like a wedding, where every detail is refined to the point of performance. This formal framing of love illuminates any imperfections seeping in around the edges, and betrays any splits in the seams. Emma and Charlie’s tectonic drift apart started just as they had settled on the perfect vintage; the more tailored everything must be to our taste, the more improbable a bond becomes. The intangible that the “perfect couple” has is a mutual recognition of each other’s strengths and fallibilities; they share a common desire to magnify the former and minimize the latter. Charlie inverted this crucial axiom at the worst possible time.

"I had a whole speech, but I've forgotten it," Charlie says just before he finally comes clean about his worst transgressions in front of everyone at the wedding. In a film rife with rifles, imagined corpses and projectile vomiting, watching Charlie delete his romantic, gushing tributes to Emma from his Google Doc are the most visceral shots in the movie. Personal credibility is vulnerable as soon as there is any hint of public polarization. In today’s world, you can easily be peer pressured out of love.

Early on, as she readies her own wedding speech, Emma recounts how the realization that she was in her first serious relationship gave her a fit of butterflies so intense it nearly sent her to the hospital. In response, Rachel incredulously asks Emma how she has only just encountered love for the first time so late in her life. "I used to be ugly," Emma says.

In that respect, Emma is precisely the outcast her friends make her out to be. She used to be ugly. Most of the rest of us still are.