There’s no making sense of “The Drama” without discussing its supposedly big twist, which was just about unavoidable online even before the movie opened. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) meet cute in a coffee shop in Boston. Zip ahead two years: they’re engaged and about to marry when, in the course of a wine-soaked evening with two friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), everyone discloses the worst thing they’ve ever done. Only Emma’s confession makes an impression: fifteen years ago, at the age of fifteen, she planned a mass shooting at her high school and nearly went through with it—but instead abandoned the plan and quickly became an anti-gun-violence activist. Rachel, whose cousin is in a wheelchair because of a school shooter, is outraged. Charlie is both horrified that his intended life partner could harbor such monstrous inclinations and terrified that she might get violent with him. He appears reluctant to marry Emma but doesn’t dare back out. Instead, he goes through the motions of preparing for the wedding as his panicky behavior becomes increasingly reckless. Of course, the wedding turns into a powder keg of secrets, and the orderly proceedings blow up in the protagonists’ faces and leave a trail of emotional and physical pain.

Two factors have launched “The Drama” to a level of commercial success and critical praise far surpassing the artistry that its writer and director, Kristoffer Borgli, brings to it. The first is the star power of its lead actors, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, whose presence exemplifies stardom: they’re more interesting to watch than anything the script gives them to say or do. The second is the extensive armchair sociology that the film has inspired. On its cinematic merits alone, the film would never have generated the profusion of think pieces, explainers, debates, and interviews that have both probed and promoted it in recent weeks. It has succeeded in projecting itself outside the screen and into culture at large not by conjuring a persuasive romantic relationship or amply imagined characters but by posing a series of hypothetical moral challenges akin to trolley problems, all of a similar (and woefully unexamined) abstraction. As a result, “The Drama” plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse. This achievement, dubious though it may be, depends upon a cleverly crafted story that builds drama with an astonishing, risible lack of inwardness, by fabricating an illusion of subjectivity. Through flashbacks and leaps ahead in time, fragmentation and fantasy scenes, the film simulates complexity while endowing its characters with mere crumbs of knowledge and experience. Viewers follow this meagre trail methodically, greedily, with heads down, driven by compulsive curiosity. The script is less of a narrative than an addictive algorithm.

Where the recent “Wuthering Heights” attracted attention for its apparent resuscitation of the romance genre, “The Drama” shows why romance hardly exists in current movies except as sidebars and subplots. Love has always been complicated—that’s why John Cassavetes’s movies are enduring landmarks of unpopular art, and why the Hays Code collapsed—but relationships were once, by consensus, straightforwardly observable on film. Today, relationships are no more intrinsically complicated than they ever were, but their verbal and visual basis in texting and social media makes them trickier to depict onscreen. To represent them substantially in the movies requires an original and creative approach to form—starting with script construction and continuing through the way that these varieties of in-person and virtual communications are filmed and displayed onscreen. Thus love, a common experience, enters the category of the extraordinary, demanding higher levels of artistry from filmmakers. With “The Drama,” Borgli does the opposite of rising to the occasion, engineering the movie to avoid dealing with his characters’ teeming and tangled inner lives. He reduces enormous swaths of experience, both personal and public, past and present, face to face and digitally mediated, to inhuman abstractions.

Emma was twenty-eight when she and Charlie met. In the two years between then and the run-up to their wedding, did Charlie never do an online search to find out who he was getting involved with? And, even if not, did this couple never talk about who they were in high school, what people from back then would remember them for? Did Charlie never meet Emma’s family or visit her home town? Have their two years together been a hermetically sealed black box of present-tense activity? Even in the present tense, the characters express no political opinions, taste in movies and music, hobbies—or backstories that shape such inclinations. “The Drama” depicts a couple who have supposedly been together for two years, yet they seem to know each other about as well as a pair of strangers thrown together a few days ago.

This calculated void is built into the movie’s elaborate editing, a striking ruse that’s built to yield puzzle-like solutions. After the coffee-shop meet-cute, the movie cuts two years ahead, to Charlie’s fancy duplex apartment, where he and Mike are working on Charlie’s wedding speech, referring to the early days of his romance with Emma and showing them in flashback. In other words, the entirety of the two-year relationship is boiled down to the few sweet and catchy reminiscences that Charlie offers (along with a joke about his inappropriate wish to talk about their sex life, which he avoids doing, though not before a quick montage of the couple in a variety of positions emphasizes his satisfaction). The apocalyptic gathering at which the two couples confess their worst deeds is fuelled by another cheap dichotomy: en route, Emma and Charlie think that they spot their wedding d.j., Pauline (Sydney Lemmon), smoking heroin on a street corner. Charlie is sure, Emma is less so—and Charlie unhesitatingly wants to fire Pauline, whereas Emma is both less judgmental and less fretful, arguing that what they saw or didn’t see has little bearing on the d.j.’s fitness to work at their wedding. Mike and Rachel take Charlie’s side; when Emma poses a glass-houses challenge (haven’t you ever done anything bad?), the parlor game of confessions is unleashed.

While watching “The Drama,” I found myself pushing hard against the narrow bounds of its characters and imagining a movie that faces complex relationships and experiences unflinchingly. The very setup suggests a screenwriter whose sense of psychology is defined with arid literalism by his own just-so, cut-to-fit contrivances. There are hints tossed out to suggest his characters’ inner recesses. For instance, Rachel, the maid of honor, isn’t a longtime friend of Emma’s; she got to know Emma only in the past two years, through Charlie—and, in her snarky speech at the wedding, Rachel wonders, vengefully, whether Emma has any “real friends.” Moreover, Emma tells Rachel and a colleague named Alice (Hannah Gross) that Charlie is her first love, and explains her late blooming in romance by noting that she used to be “ugly.” Just enough of Emma’s high-school experiences are seen in flashback to suggest other troubles—such as her experience as a Black student in a predominantly white school in Louisiana. She speaks of being socially outcast, and we see snippets of her enduring physical aggression and insults from other kids—conspicuously, not from Black kids, but the subject of her racial identity never comes up explicitly. The flashbacks to Emma’s adolescence, which Borgli films with some curiosity, are far more engaging than the film’s depictions of the chatty Boston bourgeoisie, which exude self-satisfied certainty. His failure to delve deeper into these flashback scenes and situations is as striking as their undeveloped implications.

Charlie’s subjectivity is played as a sick joke: once he learns of Emma’s grim unrealized plan, he can’t stop imagining Emma—both the thirty-year-old woman he’s about to marry and the fifteen-year-old girl (played by Jordyn Curet), whom he’s seen in an old photo—bearing a rifle. He pictures himself romancing both Emmas, at both ages, while they’re armed. Pattinson manages to convey Charlie’s unease without relying on any such crude touches, but the movie abounds in them. In his job, as a museum curator, Charlie receives a book of art photos of women with guns. The wedding photographer (Zoë Winters) insistently talks of “shooting” the couple and their families, which—quickly following flashbacks to the armed teen Emma—plays like a crude double entendre. While the couple is at a florist’s, Charlie hears a gaggle of people running in the street and assumes that they’re fleeing danger. At the wedding itself, a d.j.’s cable bursts with a gunshot-like sound. Such moments hint at comedy, but Borgli plays them humorlessly, as authentic stresses and additional wedges driving the couple apart. The people around them are no help: Rachel and Mike react with shock at Emma’s revelation, and when Charlie consults his colleague Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), she tosses off the word “psychopath” and says that she would call the police.

To the extent that there’s comedy here, it’s as irony: the world at large begins to reflect Charlie’s quandary back to him in incidental details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Those reflections of his private concerns are what “The Drama” offers in lieu of any actual public realm, any politics, any discussion of ideas or ideals. The protagonists are ultimately constructed like robots, accreting no more experiences or traits or memories than they’re programmed to have. The charismatic presence of both the leading and supporting actors doesn’t so much fill out the personalities as substitute for them. For all of its intricacy, the film’s editing conceals a void of disrespect for its characters, for experience, history, emotion, and the cinematic image itself. In its febrile moralism and its facile op-ed-ification, it pontificates about how we live now, but it has no life at all. ♦