I walked into this film ready to love it. As a longtime fan of Zendaya and someone who had heard all the buzz about a “shocking twist,” I expected something bold but still easy to sit with. Instead, I found myself halfway through realizing the film wasn’t just trying to surprise me, it was trying to make me uncomfortable.
The setup feels intimate at first. The story takes place the night before Emma (Zendaya) is set to marry Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson. It’s a small, contained setting: close friends, drinks, late-night honesty. The kind of scene that feels warm and familiar;until it isn’t.
When the group starts sharing the “worst things they’ve ever done,” the tone shifts. Emma reveals that when she was 15, she almost carried out a school shooting.
Everything after that fractures. The room, the relationships, the sense of safety. Charlie, written as a European outsider to American gun culture, becomes especially important in how the audience processes what’s happening. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, he flips through a photo book of women posed in revealing clothing, holding guns almost like props; stylized, glamorized.
Then it cuts to Emma.
Same poses. Same styling. Same guns.
That parallel says everything the film has been building toward: in America, guns don’t just symbolize violence,they symbolize power. And when you don’t feel like you have any, that symbolism can become dangerously appealing.
Emma’s explanation is what makes the film stick. She doesn’t describe her past through pure anger, but through isolation. She talks about being alone, about finding online spaces where even dark attention felt like validation. At one point, she reflects on how rare female shooters are, and how that rarity made her feel “special,” like she might finally be seen.
Emma didn’t just want attention, she wanted control. In a world where she felt dismissed, overlooked, or powerless, the idea of holding something that commands fear and respect became a kind of distorted solution. The film doesn’t excuse her thinking, but it does force you to confront where it comes from.
It’s unsettling, but it connects to reality. Data from The Violence Project shows that female mass shooters are extremely rare, which can unintentionally amplify the attention they receive. At the same time, research from Pew Research Center notes that gun ownership among women in the U.S. has been rising, often framed around ideas of independence and personal power.
That’s where the film’s message sharpens.
Emma didn’t just want attention,she wanted control. In a world where she felt invisible, a gun became a symbol of being seen, being feared, being taken seriously. The film doesn’t excuse her, but it forces you to sit with the “why.”
By the end, it stops feeling like a twist-driven movie and more like a conversation you didn’t expect to have,about loneliness, power, and what happens when the need to matter finds the wrong outlet.
And in the end, it leaves you with a question that’s harder to shake than any twist: what does it say about us that power, for some girls, is easiest to imagine at the end of a gun?
