A24 doesn’t just make horror films, but it their films are often inflected with horror sensibilities. The Drama looks like a kind of screwball romantic-comedy, but it leans heavily enough into dark comedy to be psychological horror more than rom-com.

Charlie (Robert Pattinson) spies Emma (Zendaya) one day at a coffee shop and tries to hit on her by saying he loves the book she’s reading. (He’s just checked it out on GoodReads.) But she completely ices him out—until she sees him and tells him she’s deaf in that ear (and the other ear had an earbud playing music in it). There’s your meet-cute, and it’s told retrospectively as Charlie is preparing his speech for his imminent wedding with Emma. Charlie’s buddy Mike (Mamoudou Athie) sagely warns him away from including anything about their (Charlie & Emma’s) sex-life, but we get the sense of who Charlie is: An open book, whose deception to get to know Emma is about as bad a thing as he’s ever done or thought.

This impression is confirmed when, while drinking with Mike and his girlfriend Rachel (Alana Haim), Rachel goads Mike into confessing the worst thing he ever did, and this becomes a round of confession. Mike used a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend as a human shield against an aggressive dog, and he is appropriately ashamed. Rachel, a genuine monster, trapped a mentally handicapped neighbor in the woods and didn’t tell anyone about it. (He was trapped overnight until a search party found him the next morning.) She senses, at least intellectually, this is bad, but she has no apparent guilt or remorse.

Charlie? Nothing. He makes up something about being a cyberbully once when he was fourteen, but he’s really got nothing.

Emma? Well, she planned and came right up to the edge of doing a school shooting.

And this is The Drama. In classic A24 horror style, this film is peppered with short cuts that early on reflected bits of memory (as Charlie thinking about the sex he’s had with Emma) but now reflect the character’s worst imaginings. Charlie imagining Emma shooting up the wedding. Emma imagining Mike telling Charlie to flee back to England, and assuring him that he’ll call the cops on Emma and also go beat her up.

Black comedy.

Things are already weird because modern weddings are weird, as when Emma and Charlie are working on their big wedding dance (choreographed by Anna Baryshnikov, not playing herself) and in exasperation, Emma asks if they can just do a dumb little dance to a dumb little song that makes them happy. This enrages their dance teacher, and when the couple starts talking about how performative it all feels, the dance instructor says “Weddings are performative!”

The funny thing about that, of course, is that it’s literally true, in the legal sense, at least traditionally. It is the act of saying “I do” that creates the marriage.

This raises the entire thematic question of the movie: What matters? Predictably, bitchy Rachel (who is also supposed to be the maid-of-honor) is the most offended by this school shooting plan, even though she did the by far worse actual thing. She’s enraged at Emma because she has a cousin who was paralyzed in a shooting, and states that it might be a betrayal to this cousin (whom none of them had heard of before) to go to a wedding of such a monster.

Charlie falls apart, and tries to rationalize, tries to make up excuses, tries to give Emma a justifying backstory.

Much to its credit, the movie does not. You can consider it a cheat, in the sense that there probably aren’t of basically normal kids who get so far when it comes to school shootings.

Maybe.

This movie makes a good case that it’s practically a fashion trend. The glorification of shooters and the intense interest and analysis of them after they do their crimes would be very appealing to someone who felt ignored or insignificant.

In retrospect, we see Emma suffering some mild-to-moderate bullying. We see her preparing her video explaining why she’s doing what she’s doing, and it really does seem like a performative thing. We also see what turns her around, which is both cynical and anti-cynical at the same time.

The ending is unexpectedly upbeat, returning the movie’s rom-com roots. I liked it. There is a moment where you kind of wonder (even though it’s never even slightly indicated from Emma) if Emma will end up shooting up the wedding party. That’s where a true black comedy would go. But this was more pleasant because, ultimately, Charlie and Emma are just neurotic rom-com staples, not really worthy of a horrifically bombastic, nihilistic ending.

The acting is mostly quite good. Zendaya is vulnerable and appealing, and so is RPatz. Mamoudou Athie manages to be sympathetic despite being a serious wimp. Alaina Haim is a total bitch, which is a high compliment. Seriously, many, many, many actresses try this and just end up being cringe. Rachel is a character you love to hate, and provides constant fresh outrage.

The music has a lot of the feel of a horror, pre-reveal. We heard a lot of this in Dream Scenario, too, with similar editing beats (very quick shots of imagined scenarios). Daniel Pemberton did the music here, while Owen Pallett did the score for Scenario, but I’m only now realizing that director Kristoffer Borgli’s last feature was, in fact, Dream Scenario. This is a less deeply weird film that’s much more enjoyable.

A24 movies are not for everybody. They tend to be weird, dip into the dark and horrific, and often start from a niche place to begin with. There is a bit of child peril in this film, which removes it from a lot of people’s viewing slates, but beyond that it’s ultimately kind of sweet and accessible.

I’m seeing now that I’ve pulled these images a dumb thing: Some are saying this movie is asking the serious, hard-to-answer questions of what turns kids into shooters. I can assure you it is doing no such thing, and people who think it is have a poorer understanding of mass shootings than the characters of this film.

I’ve seen some other stuff that’s suggesting Zendaya isn’t up for this part. I don’t know: It’s an awkward role, deliberately, and I found her to be vulnerable and troubled, and I sorta think that some of the bitching is due to her status as a Grrl Power type. I say she’s an actress, and that she captures the sort of strained sensitivity the movie calls for. YMMV.