Warning: This story contains spoilers.

To go see “The Drama,” the new flick starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, may feel like sitting down to a romantic comedy.

The film’s marketing revolves heavily around the idea of a gorgeous wedding, surrounded by loved ones, until Emma (Zendaya) reveals a secret a few days before she and Charlie (Pattinson) are set to get married: When she was 15, she planned to carry out a school shooting. After another mass shooting happens the same day, though, Emma doesn’t go through with it.

Studio A24 is coy about the big secret in all of its promotional materials, and viewers are given no forewarning as they settle into their seats about the subject matter that is about to play out onscreen. The trailer suggests Zendaya committed a serious faux pas — but one that might simply reflect a quirk of her personality.

The only way a moviegoer would know about the big twist is if they saw spoilers online, where critics have congregated to question the movie’s whole premise.

Melissa Alexander, whose two kids survived the 2023 Covenant School shooting that left three other children and three adults dead, knew about the plot twist going in.

Still, she walked out of the theater before it was finished. The film gave her a nightmare later that night.

Alexander saw the movie Friday night with another Covenant mom in a theater less than a mile away from the Tennessee school, and the pair walked out about two-thirds of the way in, as Charlie is talking to his friends about Emma’s past. In the scene, Charlie wonders aloud, given that mass shootings are such a prevalent problem in America, whether there may be a bunch of people who think about committing such a crime but never go through with it.

“There’s not just a bunch of normal people walking around thinking about doing something like this,” Alexander told HuffPost. “It’s a specific type of person. And to diminish it down to everyday people just really annoyed me. If somebody is watching this movie, who has some sort of ideations or thoughts about this, I think what it does for them is it helps to normalize it for them.”

An increasing number of Americans have first-hand experience with the terror of a mass shooting.

So far this year, there have been 32 shootings on campuses across the country, resulting in 15 deaths and 15 injuries, according to Everytown, a gun violence prevention organization. And there have been 99 mass shootings in America this year, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as at least four people shot, not including the shooter. Gun violence is the number one cause of death in teens and children; in 2024, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis.

Emma explains to Charlie she was bullied in school and got caught up in the “aesthetics” of mass shooters — a definition she never really parses. The movie shows Emma, wearing dark eye makeup, posing with a rifle in front of her webcam. But after a nearby shooting leaves one of her classmates dead, Emma abandons her plans and instead joins her fellow classmates in advocating for gun control. Later on, it’s revealed that Emma becomes so involved in gun control activism that she’s arrested for harassing Walmart employees for selling guns.

For Alexander, Emma’s motivating factor — bullying — felt oversimplified and woefully unrealistic. The person who killed six people at the Covenant School was not exacting revenge against peers for bullying: They were 28 and killed three 9-year-olds.

“These people are mentally ill, and they don’t just grow up to be a beautiful Hollywood actress like Zendaya,” she said.“That’s not a normal trajectory or the way somebody matures.”

Gun control activists have been among the film’s most vocal critics. One of them, Mia Tretta, was shot during the deadly 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, and also survived the recent deadly shooting at Brown University. She is an adviser for Students Demand Action, an organization of students advocating for the end of gun violence.

Tretta chastised “The Drama” filmmakers for treating school shootings as a “plot point.”

“It’s a reality I lived through when I was shot at my school at 15 years old, and again as a terrified student at Brown this past December,” she said in a statement to HuffPost. “Using a planned massacre as a rom-com hook isn’t ‘starting a conversation,’ it’s exploiting a crisis. There are ways to show nuance without using trauma as a gimmick. Studios and stars have massive platforms, and they should use them to give dimension to survivors, not perpetrators.”

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was murdered in the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, hasn’t seen the movie yet, but told HuffPost that he had hope for it given Zendaya’s past acknowledgement of his own activism. The actress once shared a clip of Guttenberg speaking at a Parkland vigil on Instagram.

But Guttenberg remains wary of any effort to explain away a mass shooter.

“Once somebody makes a decision to commit the act of gun violence, I don’t feel the need to humanize them,” Gutenberg told HuffPost.

March For Our Lives, an organization started by victims of the Parkland massacre, wrote on X that the marketing for “The Drama” — as a dark romantic comedy — is “deeply misaligned” with the reality of school shootings.

During the press tour, Zendaya has played into cutesy matrimonial tradition, donning “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” The first half of the trailer shows Emma and Charlie preparing for their nuptials with dance lessons and speechwriting, but even after Emma reveals her secret, the trailer takes on a comedic tone with flashes of physical comedy — such as when Emma pantses Charlie, and then slaps him.

“There’s some drama,” Charlie jokes.

Zendaya has acknowledged in interviews that the movie has “many elements of a romantic comedy,” but called it “heartbreaking, disturbing to some, emotional, but also so much more than that.” Pattinson, meanwhile, has said it is “so romantic.”

Entertainment reporters appear to be helping preserve the film’s big twist, though, as the stars have not been pressed to answer for the controversy. Their discussions have instead focused more broadly on the relationship between Emma and Charlie, and the moral lines that people may draw — or not — when it comes to those closest to them.

“I think the movie is exploring more, like, your personal limit, and ... the limits for how honest and how flawed you can be in your most private life,” Kristoffer Borgli, the 40-year-old Norwegian who wrote and directed “The Drama,” told the Popcorn Podcast.

There is little solid research into the minds of mass shooters. Two criminologists who spent a decade researching mass shootings told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that shooters often experience “horrific trauma” early in life, but can appear very normal in person, like “the kid sitting next to you in class.” They suggested overstigmatizing shooters could lead people to believing there is nothing that can be done to help them.

Julia Moralez knows what it’s like to know someone before they reveal a horrifying secret. She knew the mass shooter who carried out the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people and injured 89 others. The shooter once lived with Moralez, who told HuffPost that when she knew him, he was “polite, kind and well-mannered.” But reports after the shooting revealed he was a white supremacist.

Moralez was initially interested in seeing “The Drama,” but once she read the spoiler online, she didn’t think she could.

“It seemed edgy for the sake of being edgy,” Moralez told HuffPost. “There were just things I didn’t like and felt exploitative to me personally. Even the title, ‘The Drama,’ just making light of something that is a real-life situation for a lot of people … just doesn’t sit right with me.”

The film also goes against statistics that show mass shootings are typically carried out by boys and men. Emma’s gender is only briefly discussed in the movie when, during a class discussion on mass shooters, Emma corrects one of her classmates when they say that mass shooters are almost always boys. Emma chimes in and says that not only do girls do it sometimes, but mass shootings even happen outside of America, too.

But Moralez doesn’t see it that way.

“If you look at the numbers, it’s something that affects men,” Moralez said. “And I think that that’s something that needs to be looked at. And I think that twisting it to [be] a female issue, for the sake of a story, a good drama, is kind of belittling an issue that affects males, especially as someone who knows someone who shot and killed more than 50 people and live-streamed it.”

“I like Zendaya as an actor, but I’m kind of disappointed that she took this role because I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right to me.”

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