Seen from the right warped angle, “The Drama,” a new film from the Norwegian director and screenwriter Kristoffer Borgli, is less a drama than it is a comedy—a romantic comedy, which kicks off with what one character will later describe as a classic “meet-cute.” Though, since it involves a white lie, a misunderstanding, and some borderline stalkerish behavior, it’s perhaps more of a meet-sketchy. In a bustling Boston café, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) is instantly smitten with Emma (Zendaya), who’s quietly reading a novel by a window. He looks up the title on his phone and, after scanning a plot summary, approaches her from behind, gushing about how much he loves the book—only to get no response. Emma, he doesn’t realize, hasn’t heard him speak; she’s deaf in her right ear and listening to music via her left one. Some confusion and awkwardness ensues until Emma, recognizing what’s going on, lets Charlie off the hook with a forgiving smile and an interested query: “Can we start over?”

That question will become something of a steady motif for Charlie and Emma. Or, rather, it has already become one, given that this origin story turns out to be a flashback, an episode that Charlie is considering mentioning in his speech for their wedding, which is fast approaching. Over the course of their relationship, you gather, Charlie and Emma have dodged many an argument by hitting the reset button, allowing themselves an easy do-over, with the possibility of some goofily improvised role-play. But “Can we start over?” also proves grimly prophetic; by the end, the two lovers might well wish that they had never started in the first place. Their perfectly imperfect romance narrative has been derailed by a more dangerous form of storytelling, the kind that can strand even the closest relationship in uncharted territory.

If you haven’t yet seen “The Drama” and plan to, best to stop reading here, before all is revealed. One night, as Charlie and Emma are finalizing food and wine selections for the wedding, with their married friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), an ill-advised game of “What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done?” begins. Emma’s worst thing, blurted out in a moment of drunken foolishness, is a particular doozy: when she was fifteen, she says, she planned to carry out a mass shooting at her high school. Thankfully, she didn’t go through with it and would never dream of doing such a thing now, though that’s scant consolation for her fiancé and friends, who, for a while, are in utter disbelief. Rachel furiously turns on Emma, with a mix of self-righteous hypocrisy and vindictive spite that occasions Haim’s strongest, spikiest work since her star-making turn in “Licorice Pizza” (2021). Charlie, although more sympathetic, is left reeling, and Pattinson, always at his best when his matinée-idol looks surrender to warpings of fear and anxiety, conducts a virtuosic symphony of shifting moods. As the wedding-day countdown accelerates, ushering in a litany of vender appointments and other logistical niceties, Charlie can’t stop wondering what the point of it all is—and who, exactly, this woman he claims to love so unconditionally is.

Does the movie itself know who she is? I’m not so sure. Emma is a literary editor, though the specifics are awfully vague—a late subplot involving challenges on the job feels particularly superficial—and her love for literature seems to begin and end with that novel in the café. Zendaya more than fulfills the central requirement of a romantic lead—when she’s onscreen, you can’t imagine looking at anyone else—but her striking presence alone can’t provide the psychological illumination that the film needs as a portrait of repressed, and ultimately redeemed, violence. “The Drama” has a juicy, combustible premise that it struggles to justify, not because there’s anything inherently distasteful about broaching the subject of real-world gun violence in the context of a sexy, tempestuous Hollywood melodrama but, rather, because Emma’s deep, dark secret simply doesn’t ring true.

Some might contend that this seeming implausibility is very much to the film’s point, insofar as many shooters’ identities have taken their communities by surprise. (One scene acknowledges the relative rarity of shootings committed by women, mainly so that it can then conveniently bat that statistic away.) But Borgli undermines his premise—ironically, by attempting to substantiate it. He repeatedly flashes back more than a decade to the high-school-age Emma, played by Jordyn Curet, who bears little physical or emotional resemblance to her Zendaya counterpart. Is that also the film’s point—that people can, in fact, transform themselves dramatically—or is it plain bad casting? Would it have made more sense for Zendaya, although several years older than when she first starred as a teen-age drug addict on the HBO series “Euphoria,” to embody Emma’s younger self as well? In any event, Curet’s Emma is a case study and a cipher. She’s lonely, isolated, and bullied; she wears nerd-coded glasses one minute and disreputable eye makeup the next. She has ready access to her father’s military rifle, which she drags around her family’s pointedly empty house as if it were her closest companion. Emma is turned on by the aesthetics of sociopathic rage and enjoys making online videos in which she spews hatred and poses with the rifle. But she is most heavily influenced, the film suggests, by the sheer ubiquity of school shootings and gun culture, which has contaminated America at large with a free-floating psychic residue of mass violence.

Borgli, a co-editor on the film, cuts jaggedly between past and present, and sometimes between reality and hallucination. Watching the young Emma, we can never be entirely sure if we are seeing an accurate representation of a distant time, a distorted memory of Emma’s, or a paranoid imagining of Charlie’s. In a way, the filmmaker is accessing the slippery terrain of his previous work, “Dream Scenario” (2023), an ominous black comedy that starred Nicolas Cage as a kind of flop-sweaty Freddy Krueger figure—a nebbishy professor who invaded the dreams of everyone around him. It was, like “The Drama,” a story about the dangerous power of suggestion, the repeated blows to our collective psyche, and the ease of villainizing someone for things that they didn’t actually do.

“Dream Scenario” was darkly amusing for a while, before it ultimately crapped out, unable to sustain either its funny-scary genre mechanics or its moribund cancel-culture subtext. “The Drama,” for all its miscalculations, is better at holding your interest. It was richly shot, on film, by Arseni Khachaturan, who brings out a lustrous golden-afternoon warmth in the film’s Boston locations, and it has an intensely jangly horror-film score, by Daniel Pemberton, that keeps your nerves suitably off-balance. Mostly, though, it holds you for a structurally built-in reason, the kind that keeps wedding movies in business. It isn’t just Emma but Charlie and Emma’s very beautiful and expensive nuptials that are in danger of being cancelled.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Forced to play the game himself, Borgli might not supply what many would deem the obvious answer: a relationship that he had in his twenties with a teen-age girl from Oslo. She was ten years his junior and not yet of voting age (eighteen) but over the age of consent (sixteen). Borgli wrote defensively about his “May-December romance” in an essay that was published by a Norwegian magazine in 2012; an English translation recently resurfaced in The Hollywood Reporter during the publicity campaign for “The Drama,” which is being released in theatres this week by A24. In short, the toxic cloud of judgment that Borgli seeks to interrogate has settled around and polluted the reception to the movie itself, forming a kind of life-versus-art ouroboros that, in the eyes of the most cynical marketeers, might seem less a blow than an opportunity.

I mention this not because Borgli’s life choices are under review but because his artistic ones are. And although “The Drama” has mercifully little to add to the self-serving tedium of so much age-gap discourse, it does boast at least one prominent visual-design element—a spiral staircase, in Charlie and Emma’s apartment—that reminded me, each time I saw it, of a similar fixture in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979). I don’t think I’m casting about idly for associations here; I saw “The Drama” and sensed the connection even before reading Borgli’s essay, in which he holds up “Manhattan,” with its “open and romantic” presentation of a fictional May-December romance, as justification for his real-life one. The characters in “The Drama” have quintessentially Allen-esque jobs in the literary and artistic establishments; Charlie works as a curator at a Cambridge art museum, and his job is only slightly less decorative, in the context of the narrative, than his fiancée’s is. At one point, driven nearly mad by Emma’s revelations, he finds a provocative book of art photographs on his desk, filled with images of women holding guns—and proceeds to torment himself with visions of Emma in the same sexy-violent poses.

“The Drama” never manages to imbue Emma with more depth than one of those images. The movie’s attempts to dramatize her history of near-violence feel perfunctory to the point of incuriosity. It treats her mental-health history not as a complicated reality but as a premise, a narrative impetus, and, worst of all, a problem that seems to weigh more heavily on those around her than it does on her. (No illumination is forthcoming from Emma’s parents, who, despite being significant variables in this scenario, are kept out of the spotlight until the big wedding-day climax.) I fear that this is at least partly, and through no fault of her own, a Zendaya issue. I was reminded, unhappily, of “Malcolm & Marie” (2021), in which the director and writer, Sam Levinson (of “Euphoria” fame), cast her as a recovering drug addict, turning her scantily attired body and her howls of resentment into a voyeuristic spectacle. “The Drama” treats her better than that, but to no more substantial effect: rather than messily exploiting her, it reduces her to a tidy blank. Either way, you have to wonder: What is it about Zendaya that compels certain filmmakers—and, there’s no way around it, certain white male filmmakers—to pelt her with gobs of unexplored trauma? Do they think suffering looks good on her? Does her air of youthful innocence provide just the touch of sugar they need to make the hard-core medicine go down?

A more honest appraisal of Emma’s character, and of her and Charlie’s chances of staying together, might have been conducted without the artificial pressurization of a wedding-countdown framework. And yet it’s in the accumulation of tension and the exacerbation of squirm that Borgli’s real strengths as a filmmaker lie. The road to Charlie and Emma’s big day is paved with tense appointments and ill-fated encounters, the most memorable of which involves Charlie’s colleague Misha, played, with a brilliant swirl of matter-of-fact cynicism and empathetic concern, by Hailey Benton Gates. The wedding itself unfolds as a series of escalating set pieces, dryly observed and thoroughly excruciating, that reminded me of the great Scandinavian tradition of gathering-from-hell movies, including Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration” (1998) and Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (2011). As in those films, Borgli sends up the emptiness and tedium of codified social rituals—what the couple’s dance instructor describes, witheringly, as their “inherently performative” nature. “The Drama” ends on a note of grace that suggests Charlie and Emma may well survive the horror of their wedding; it also suggests that they will look back on it, in the future, as the actual worst thing they’ve ever done. ♦