New A24 Trailer Dares You to Imagine the Worst Thing Zendaya Has Ever Done

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? No one entering into a serious relationship really wants to ask that question, but it’s a necessary bit of pre-wedding honesty—and in theory fun. Furthermore, most people expect fairly banal answers, like the little annoyances that Robert Pattinson and Zendaya‘s characters admit throughout the first half of the trailer for A24’s new intentionally aloof The Drama.

But midway through the teaser footage, things take a change. The answer given by Emma Harwood, the bride-to-be played by Zendaya, is enough to shock her friends (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) and terrify betrothed Charlie Thompson (Pattinson), leading to a cavalcade of calamities throughout the second half of the trailer.

So what is the terrible thing that Emma did? The trailer doesn’t give us any answers, but with Kristoffer Borgli directing and Ari Aster producing, it’s bound to be something nasty., right? Right?!

After all, Aster built his reputation on documenting the most unpleasant aspects of the human psyche, whether it be the shocking deaths and ravages of grief in Hereditary and Midsommar to… that happening in “The Strange Thing About the Johnsons.” Meanwhile Norwegian-born writer/director Borgli is less well-known to American viewers than Aster, but he already has established a reputation for getting weird. His debut film, the pseudo-documentary DRIB (2017), starred Amir Asgharnejad as a comedian who almost becomes a spokesperson for an energy drink, creating all sorts of chaos in the process. Sick of Myself (2022) follows a couple in Norway who come into possession of an experimental Russian anxiety medication with horrific side effects. Most Americans first learned of Borgli though with 2023’s Dream Scenario, in which Nicolas Cage played a boring middle-aged man who starts showing up in the dreams of strangers.

In each of these films, Borgli thrusts his characters into unlikely situations and invites us to watch the unexpected turns that follow. From that information alone, we can probably guess that Emma’s confession is going to take some dark turns.

However, it’s the absence of the confession that makes the trailer for The Drama so interesting. Much of the trailer features elements that anyone would find stressful in the most banal situations. Everyone experiences anxiety over big relationship decisions, and those feelings only compound with the high stakes—and high price tags—involved in a wedding. Even if the worst thing she ever did was swipe a packet of baseball cards from a Walmart when she was 11, Emma’s confession would create tension.

The fact that The Drama looks so thrilling and funny without knowing the central plot point makes the setup incredibly compelling. We don’t know what Emma did, but we know it’s going to be bad, and we know it’s going to create a mess. So what is the worst thing you ever did? And what do you think Zendaya did to make RPatz react like that?!

The Drama hits theaters on April 3, 2026.