The week before a wedding is a messy time. Even the most solid of couples will face logistical nightmares, involving last-minute hitches in the catering or the DJ or the venue, that feel in the moment like genuine crises. And couples with a smidgen of doubt? Couples with either two or four cold feet? Well, the crisis will feel existential, threatening the entire prospective union.

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama explores this general truth through a very specific and unusual scenario, which casts a pall over the impending nuptials of Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson). It has to do with a revelation she makes, when the bride and bridegroom are submitting to a drunken last sampling of the food with his best friend Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Mike’s wife Rachel (Alana Haim), who is also the maid of honour. Or is supposed to be, until this revelation sends them all reeling.

The drama of the title springs from a little game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done,” a dangerous game begun innocently enough, the result of the poor social defence mechanisms of the inebriated. Mike and Rachel share comparatively innocuous “worst things,” though both are things they should be (and are) ashamed of. Charlie, either because he’s too secretive or he really has nothing, comes up with something that barely qualifies for the exercise. But Emma has a look of scared hesitation, the kind you get when you know you’re going to say something, and you already regret saying it, but you know you’re going to say it anyway. And sure enough, she should not have said it.

It’s useful not to know what this thing is, even though you will know it before The Drama is 20 minutes old. It’s useful because when you see the game starting, you the viewer will start imagining what sorts of things it could be – while, of course, reviewing your own answer to such a potential question, and whether you’d be willing to share it with even your closest mates. But you will never come up with what the thing actually is, and you and this movie will spend the rest of the time trying to decide how bad it is – and whether Charlie does, indeed, need to call off the wedding.

Borgli made his first big splash a couple years ago with Dream Scenario, the highest of high concept movies. If you didn’t see it, it was the movie where everyone in the world started dreaming about a balding entomologist played by Nicolas Cage, for no apparent reason. But inside that film’s high concept was a deep and sometimes painful look at relationships between human beings. Though The Drama is not as high concept as that on the one hand, it is indeed a sort of conceptual masterpiece in terms of provoking thought about what an average person would do in this scenario, decidedly not a “dream” scenario. And it is very much about the complexities of relationships between human beings.

The movie tricks us into a comfort zone of romcom trappings, including a meet cute between Charlie and Emma – he pretends he read the book she’s reading in order to sound smart – and other moments that such films use to show you just how much in love these characters are. Then it upends our sense of ease, demanding that we weigh an event from the distant past against all these moments specifically chosen to illustrate the feeling of bliss shared by two people.

Although this is not a two-hander in the strictest sense of that term, both Zendaya and Pattinson are veterans of such movies. A few years ago, Zendaya starred opposite John David Washington in the all-nighter argument Malcolm & Marie, and last year, Pattinson was on the receiving end of Jennifer Lawrence’s insane postpartum depression in Die My Love. Anyone expecting a movie with a similar tone to those dour affairs will be disappointed, though they should be pleased, because Borgli’s more comedic approach feels more introspective about these characters than either of those films. It’s a crazy thing he’s pulled off here, because The Thing We’re Not Speaking Of is certainly no laughing matter, and yet Borgli wrings laughter from us because of the absurdity of the scenario. The somehow highly plausible absurdity of the scenario.

And his actors are key collaborators here. Both feel like they’ve dropped their pretensions in trying to delve into this weird new matzo ball, to quote a famous Seinfeld episode, that has fallen into their lives. And we are supposed to judge Emma for The Thing, but we’re also witness to all sorts of sketchy behaviour by Charlie, who actually snaps a photo of the book Emma’s reading while she’s getting coffee, then googles it, then moves in to hit on her, pretending that his knowledge of the book is organic and genuine. We’re all guilty of omissions and even deceptions in relationships, it may only be a matter of degrees.

And to what degree is the thing Emma did important? It’s certainly enough for some people in this movie to shun her, but is it predictive of future behaviour or her ability to be relied on as a mate? Borgli puts those questions out there, but he isn’t keen to answer them. Rather, he’s keen to show how they henpeck Charlie’s already henpecked mind, as Borgli relies heavily on cutaways, imagined flashbacks, or other sorts of dream imagery that might provide a flimsy link to his previous film.

The link, though, is flimsy to be sure. And that’s what makes Borgli so exciting as a newish talent. (He has a bunch of shorts and two other comparatively obscure features.) If Borgli appeared to be borrowing heavily from Charlie Kaufman in Dream Scenario, that isn’t what he’s doing here, and in fact, The Drama leaves us bereft of possibly comparison points, though any filmmaker who specialises in awkward relationship dynamics may have inspired him. The two films do, though, have something to do with cancellation in the internet age, and The Drama has one foot heavily in another topical issue we said we wouldn’t spoil. This we can spoil: Kristoffer Borgli has his finger on the pulse — or at least a pulse — and he makes fascinating work.

 

The Drama is currently playing in Australian cinemas.