It’s usually more the case than not that two films will show up in theaters with themes so eerily similar it borders on coincidence. In the United States specifically, that theme would trickle down to a shared coping mechanism — satire and dark humor as a vehicle for processing gun violence. And while each film stands in its own respective glory, the subject matter at their cores overlaps enough that discussing one almost demands discussing the other.
A spoiler warning is in effect for both films, as the topics discussed play a pivotal role in shaping the worlds these stories inhabit.
The Drama starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson zeroes in on a couple on the verge of marriage, cutting back and forth between their lives building to a present day steeped in love — until one cheeky confession causes all hell to break loose.
Our Hero, Balthazar sees Jaeden Martell and Asa Butterfield form an unlikely bond through the most performative of circumstances. Expectations are subverted, and lives are explored deeply to understand why two people behave the way they do — and why they forge such an unexpected connection in a society increasingly spotlighting the male loneliness epidemic.
The Drama (2026)
Director & Writer: Kristoffer Borgli
Cast: Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamoudou Athie, Hailey Gates, Zoë Winters, Hannah Gross, Sydney Lemmon, Anna Baryshnikov, Michael Abbot Jr., Jordyn Curet
This movie was held in high anticipation for the star power alone — Zendaya and Robert Pattinson sharing a screen is an event in itself. But the marketing did its job too, teasing a specific scene and narrative device that would dramatically alter the course of the story. Before the wedding, Emma (Zendaya), Charlie (Pattinson), his best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and Mike’s wife Rachel (Alana Haim) sit down to play a game: confess the worst thing you’ve ever done. Naturally, this happens after a few drinks, at Rachel’s persistent encouragement.
SPOILER WARNING: Emma had planned a mass shooting at the age of 15. One she ultimately never went through with.
For context on the others: Charlie cyberbullied someone into leaving town. Mike used an ex-partner as a human shield during a dog attack. Rachel locked a cognitively disabled childhood neighbor in an RV closet for hours — possibly overnight. We never truly find out.
Up until this moment, the film plays out with the warmth and rhythm of a classic rom-com. Then the confession lands. What follows is anxiety-inducing, conflicting, darkly comedic, and — as the title suggests — dramatic.
But what Kristoffer Borgli is truly interrogating is something more unsettling: why does an unexecuted thought about mass violence rank worse in our moral hierarchy than actions that actually harmed real people? The contrast is glaring. And deliberate.
Zendaya as the so-called “culprit” of a hypothetical crime is already an anomaly — she is both a woman and Black in a space where the archetype skews drastically otherwise. According to The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research center, white individuals make up approximately 52–55% of mass shooters. One has to wonder whether Emma’s race and gender shape the severity of the judgment she receives — particularly at the hands of someone who actually did follow through with causing real harm to a real person.
It also taps into something culturally pervasive right now. We live in a moment where younger generations are more socially aware than ever — attuned to their neighborhoods, their government, their world. But the flip side of that awareness is a teetering tension between genuine advocacy and performance. Rachel embodies a particular kind of online identity: the virtue signaler. The moral grandstander. What some might call a grifter dressed in the language of activism.
Rachel doesn’t just react to Emma’s confession — she weaponizes it. She hounds Emma, demeans her, and sets the tone for how everyone else begins to process what was said. Charlie, notably, doesn’t immediately condemn Emma. He chuckles. It isn’t until Rachel escalates that his anxiety takes root and begins to grow.
Have we become too desensitized to be shocked by a confession like Emma’s? And while Rachel’s response is clearly performative, shouldn’t the more pressing question be: what kind of society plants that thought in a 15-year-old’s mind in the first place? The conversation around gun violence in America almost always arrives here — at the intersection of media, culture, and what we expose our children to, or more devastatingly, what we leave them to find on their own.
The United States holds the highest firearm homicide rate among high-income nations — approximately 25 to 26 times higher than the average of its peers. It hits differently when a film set here uses dark comedy and two beloved leads to make that statistic feel human, and almost palatable. Almost.
Our Hero, Balthazar (2026)
Director: Oscar Boyson
Writers: Oscar Boyson & Ricky Camilleri
Cast: Jaeden Martell, Asa Butterfield, Jennifer Ehle, Chris Bauer, Becky Ann Baker, Noah Centineo, Avam Jogia, Anna Baryshnikov, Pippa Knowles
Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut is clever, humorous, and above all, disarmingly real. It maps the microcosm of young men growing up in the United States — two locations, two backgrounds, one collision course.
Balthazar “Balthy” Malone (Jaeden Martell) is a wealthy New York teenager addicted to posting performative videos online. His sensitivity is a brand. His audience is one person: his crush, an activist invested in combating gun violence.
Solomon Jackson (Asa Butterfield), known online as “Deathdealer_16,” projects a hardened, hyper-masculine persona. Offline, he’s insecure, lonely, and quietly devoted — working a gas station job to support himself and his grandmother.
Balthy posts a video. The algorithm does the rest. Solomon sees it and sends a message about committing a school shooting. Balthy boards a plane from New York to Texas, framed in his mind as an act of heroism. In reality, it’s an elaborate bid to impress his crush. The most extreme gesture of “activism” imaginable — motivated entirely by a boy who wants a girl to notice him.
Where The Drama keeps gun violence at arm’s length — a hypothetical, a confession, a catalyst — Balthazar brings it closer. Boyson’s film is more direct in examining the pipeline from online radicalization to real-world consequence. And yet, similar to Emma, Solomon resists easy categorization as a villain. We learn about his father’s influence, his financial reality, his emotional life with his grandmother. He is dorky. Ambitious. Trying.
SPOILER WARNING: Balthazar is the one who pulls the trigger. In the end, after Balthy accidentally shoots Solomon’s grandmother during a struggle, Solomon snaps — and Balthy shoots him. The boy who flew across the country to be a hero becomes the one who ends a life. It’s a gut punch, and it’s meant to be.
But Boyson isn’t simply switching the villain label from one character to another. The more pointed question is this: what kind of culture teaches two young men to treat gun violence as performance — as spectacle, as tool, as shortcut to validation? Balthy’s comfort around firearms is introduced early. His excitement around them reads as a red flag long before the ending confirms it.
Two sides of the same coin. Solomon venting his frustration online, dealt a difficult hand. Balthy leveraging that same platform for social currency. They clash not in spite of their differences — but because of their similarities.
The film is a comedy. It is also one of the more sobering portraits of American youth culture in recent memory. The politics embedded in its characters are astonishing to witness at a moment when people like this — from both ends of the internet — genuinely exist.
Nature versus nurture hovers over everything. How much of what these young men became was out of their control? How much is on the parents, the platforms, the country? It’s difficult to pin blame squarely on either when society feels like the most consistent variable.
The Common Denominator
Both films are set in America. Both center young people — or young versions of people — shaped by a culture that has normalized the conversation around gun violence while arguably doing little to resolve it. The subtext shifts between virtue signaling, alpha male culture, and performative activism — but the common denominator remains constant. A loaded gun. A fractured society. And the dark comedy we’ve apparently decided is the most honest way to talk about it.
What’s most striking isn’t what these films say individually — it’s what they reveal together. That we have arrived at a moment where gun violence functions as narrative shorthand. As satire. As character catalyst. As the backdrop against which love stories and buddy comedies can be told. Whether that’s a testament to cinema’s evolving courage in confronting American reality, or a reflection of just how normalized the unthinkable has become — that’s the question both films leave sitting in the room with you, long after the credits roll.