Django Rest Framework APIClient not handling exceptions during tests

I'm testing an API endpoint that is supposed to raise a ValidationError in a Django model (note that the exception is a Django exception, not DRF, because it's in the model).

from rest_framework.test import APITestCase


class TestMyView(APITestCase):
    # ...
    def test_bad_request(self):
        # ...
        response = self.client.post(url, data)
        self.assertEqual(response.status_code, status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

However, my test errors out with an exception instead of passing. It doesn't even fail because it gets a 500 instead of 400, it doesn't even get there at all. Isn't DRF's APIClient supposed to handle every exception? I've search online but found nothing. I've read that DRF doesn't handle Django's native ValidationError, but still that doesn't explain why I am not even getting a 500. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?