And who deserves forgiveness?

This week I made a return to one of my favourite places in the entire world, the cinema. I don’t know how it’s been nearly a year but anyway, free ticket in hand (Thanks Grandma!) bank account assaulted for a regular sized popcorn (£8.50 but it had to be done) I made my way to my seat on the back row and got ready to watch The Drama.

Just a heads up, this article includes spoilers!

Perhaps I was too emo as a teenager, maybe I’m too forgiving as an adult, but personally the hugely shocking morality testing statement posited by this film was such a non-issue for myself. Placed in that situation I would just forgive and move on with my life. We’ve all done bad things and to truly love someone is to love them wholly, flaws included.

Picture this, you’ve met the love of your life in a dreamy coffee shop meetcute- which may I add you approach in the most stalkerish manner possible. You fumble, horribly and yet this perfect, beautiful woman gives you the option to start over. Isn’t that we all desire in life, the opportunity to start over and begin again. Anyway we see this lovely montage of lead characters Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) and their life together, from awkward first date all the way to the week before their wedding. This is where things go south.

A dimly lit room, too much booze, a rather prickly maid of honour, Rachael ( Alana Haim) ,her ever-refereeing husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie) along with the to-be-weds begin to play a game. Oh here we go. I’m squirming, the guy two seats away from me is laughing his head off, I wasn’t aware this was the comedy of the year. Anyway this group starts to detail the worst things they have ever done. I guess it’s a kind of honesty is the best policy type of thing, forgive and forget. Let it out and move on with our lives, well that’s how Rachel’s character manages to coax the rest of the cast into their admissions of the worst things they have ever done.

When we finally get to Emma, she confesses that when she was 15, lonely, bullied, isolated, she planned and almost carried out a school shooting.The key point here being that she didn’t actually do anything, she simply fantasized about it. This is in no way me saying that school shootings or any mass shooting for that matter is okay, it’s just that unlike other characters (Rachel locked a mentally impaired child in a closet in an abandoned cabin for crying out loud!!) Emma never actually did anything, and yet she was demonised and punished by her peers the most.

As the film continues on, Charlie is faced with the dilemma that his fiance is potentially a psychopath, which is only fueled by the reactions of those around him, thus sending him spiraling. Despite her pleas to start over with Charlie, being as open as possible with him, he still cannot shift this idea that Emma is an inherently violent person. However, through trying to be understood the audience come to see what actually happened in Emma’s past, how her plans were squandered after a mass shooting took place in her town. This incident opened her eyes to damage that she would cause, realising the error of her ways and actually enacting positive change in her life by becoming an anti-gun activist. It’s important to bear in mind that she’s only 15 at this point, kids are easily influenced. By seeing her background the audience learns that she spent a lot of her adolescence alone with access to the internet, which is how she fell down a rabbit hole of idolising the aesthetic of school shootings.

So does she deserve to be forgiven? This is the question that the film is trying to tackle. Can you learn something truly awful about your partner and love them regardless? Should we hide our intrusive thoughts, ugly moments and darkest fantasies from those we love? If we reveal them, will we still receive their love?

Ultimately this movie concludes in an open-ended fashion. After a truly disastrous wedding reception, the couple by chance meet at a diner. Emma pretends to not know her disgraced husband, giving him the chance to begin again, this time he appears to accept the new start.