Wedding comedy 'The Drama' is an audaciously uncomfortable affair

Do you know the worst thing your partner ever did? Do you really want to? You might think you do, but you probably don’t. They say some questions are better left unanswered. Others are even better left unasked. So goes the premise of writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s screamingly funny cringe comedy “The Drama,” which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a picture-perfect Back Bay couple whose lavish wedding plans are thrown into disarray after a drunken confession shatters the foundations of their relationship. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you what it is. But trust me, it’s a doozy.

If you like laughing at things we’re not supposed to joke about, I’ve got good news. “The Drama” is an audaciously uncomfortable affair, working the audience’s nerves and pushing touchy buttons with diabolical delight. Most of the people I saw the movie with loved it — though some seemed a little afraid to admit it — while one friend who hated the film was furious. Borgli eggs on those kinds of reactions, teetering on the edge of tastelessness. “The Drama” is the most provocative American movie I’ve seen since “Eddington,” and will probably be just as divisive. The film feels a little dangerous, like it wants to start an argument.

Pattinson stars as Charlie, head curator of the fictional Cambridge Art Museum (played by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover). He first meets Zendaya’s Emma at a Copley Square coffee shop, falling head-over-heels via a cutesy misunderstanding straight out of a ‘90s rom-com. He’s a handsome English nebbish in the Hugh Grant mold, all bumbling charm and chiseled good looks. She’s a poised and almost otherworldly beauty, yet her eyes tell us Emma has a secret. Boy, does she. It spills out during a food-and-wine tasting at their tony wedding venue in Ipswich, where the stunned best man (Mamoudou Athie) and outraged maid of honor (Alana Haim) end up enduring the world’s most awkward wait for an Uber.

The film excels at these tortured moments, stewing in heavy silences with abrupt cuts that work as pressure release valves for the audience. The director and Joshua Raymond Lee are both credited as editors, and I can’t think of a recent movie that gets as much mileage out of abrupt juxtapositions and jagged leaps in time. It’s a film of beautifully polished surfaces that are all about to crack. This isn’t the comically opulent Boston of “It Ends with Us,” but it’s close. (I’m told that Charlie and Emma’s mouth-watering apartment with its spiral staircase was an actual Back Bay location and not a set built for the picture.) Borgli understands that there’s an irresistible schadenfreude in putting such impossibly attractive, successful people in these luxurious settings and seeing everything fall apart with a slip of the tongue.

Having long since forsaken his teen idol status, Pattinson has blossomed into the kind of mischievous character actor who can usually be counted on to have the silliest voice in a movie. (I mean this as a compliment.) But “The Drama” calls upon a different set of skills, positioning him as a conventionally handsome leading man and then watching him implode. It’s an incredibly witty and precise performance, collapsing in intervals from scene to scene as his tousle-headed appeal veers into dishevelment and hysteria. Zendaya, who is too often called upon to play the frowny-face in franchise movies — it feels like she wore the same scowl for all five hours of “Dune” — here gets to play up her mysterious and slightly scary allure. It’s no coincidence that Borgli has written Charlie as an Englishman and Emma as a Louisiana transplant to Boston. Her character clearly represents the Scandinavian filmmaker’s attraction to — and fear of — America, with its great beauty and history of violence. (This makes the racial dynamics of the relationship even more explosive, if a mite troublingly unexamined.)

The film is peppered with striking supporting turns, most notably from my future wife Alana Haim as the raving mad maid of honor. The pop star’s turn in 2021’s “Licorice Pizza” was one of the great screen debuts of this decade, so it’s been frustrating since then to see her so underused in films like Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” Haim is an absolute scream in “The Drama,” seething with a self-righteous indignation that’s more than a little hypocritical given certain sins to which her character has confessed. When she glares into the camera, it feels like she’s going to burn a hole in the screen. As Pattinson’s put-upon assistant, Hailey Benton Gates executes one of the deftest bits of physical comedy I’ve seen in some time, while Zoë Winters had me howling with laughter as a wedding photographer having a very difficult day at work.

Bobcat Goldthwait’s gasp-inducing 2006 bestiality comedy “Sleeping Dogs Lie” shares a similar setup with “The Drama,” but that film’s concerns stuck strictly with relationships and gross-out comedy while Borgli is obviously aiming for something more politically loaded. It’s a big breakthrough for the Norwegian filmmaker, whose previous films struck this critic as all dressed up with nowhere to go — clever premises in search of a story. His 2022 “Sick of Myself” followed an influencer giving herself rare skin diseases for likes and public affirmation, while 2023’s “Dream Scenario” starred Nicolas Cage as a dull, average man who, for reasons unknown, begins appearing in the dreams and nightmares of strangers, vilified and persecuted by the public for his unwilling role in their fantasy lives.

Neither of these pictures came to what could reasonably be called a conclusion. “The Drama” might be the first time Borgli’s written an actual ending, and the movie hurtles toward the inevitable. Weddings this big and expensive build a momentum of their own, and it’s almost dizzying how quickly we find ourselves headed to the altar alongside this couple, wondering if they ever really knew each other in the first place. There’s a lot of truth in this film, even if finding an all-night diner in Cambridge these days is something that can only happen in the movies.

“The Drama” opens in theaters on Thursday, April 2.