Charlie’s story is decidedly unsatisfactory with him vaguely suggesting he kinda cyber-bullied some kid when he was 14 or 15. Yet his inability to remember any details calls into question whether the bullying ever happened or if he was just grasping at something to impress the others. After all, this is a man who freely admits in his wedding toast that he only worked up the courage to talk to Emma the first time they met by lying about finishing the same book she was reading in a coffee shop.

Emma’s confession on the other hand? Oh, there was no lie there. Under extreme duress, as well as the good vibes that a third or fourth bottle of wine on date night can unlock, Emma confides that she might’ve, possibly, fantasized about shooting up her high school. Actually… it was more than a fantasy. She almost did it, complete with a plan, a hit list, and the gun itself, which she carried to school that day in her backpack.

It’s such an earth-shattering realization that compounds from a universal cognitive dissonance between the well-coiffed, glamorous effect that Zendaya naturally cultivates and the image of the lonely, alienated teenager with a gun, that characters and audiences alike cannot fully process the information before the dinner, like the film, is left in a chaotic limbo. Rachel quickly suggests in no uncertain terms that Emma is a monster and immediately makes the scene about herself and how she has a cousin who was put in a wheelchair by a shooting. And that high-handed condemnation immediately shuts Emma off before she can talk through why she felt the way she did back then or how she might have changed… She did change, right?!

Indeed, the rest of the movie is her trying to move on from the unwise confession and Charlie stewing on it in the final six days before their wedding, determining whether he in fact is marrying “a psychopath,” as Mike and Rachel call the bride-to-be.

Obviously a lot of the appeal of the movie is from the audience debating whether they could “forgive” Emma for the horrible urges she had 15 years ago. It’s such a big question mark, it sneaks up on us that Charlie’s own neurotic fecklessness becomes an even bigger “drama” as his mind festers until he turns their wedding into a crescendo of cringe-comic nightmare fuel.

And yet, the one element I feel that is really overlooked is the much worse secret that the three “regular” characters—Charlie, Mike, and Rachel—normalize and immediately sweep under the rug, especially after Emma’s admission. While there is plenty of discussion online about the general awfulness of each of them, especially Rachel, what is minimized and overlooked is that she, um… might’ve just low-key admitted to killing a kid. And if she did kill a child (or almost did), why did the context clues of her story make it okay and worthy of no further thought or follow-up while everyone else, including the audiences, spends the rest of the movie Rashomon-ing every gesture or glance Emma ever made?